Zoo Kids vs. Wild Kids

In an earlier issue, I recommended The Nature Institute. I received their December newsletter and it had many stimulating articles.

One article is about the difference in skulls between zoo lions and their wild counterparts still living in the area where the zoo lions were taken. The zoo lion skulls are larger but the largeness is due to a spongier bone so the brain case is actually smaller. The author suggests that the difference stems from the muscular activity required of the wild lions to kill prey. This regular exertion shapes the bones, developing denser bone.

The day after reading this, I was leading children on explorations of the Redding Arboretum. As the class walked on the sidewalk from the school toward me, the teacher led the way. For the most part, the girls followed behind the teacher and tagging behind in disarray were groups of boys with their energy turned in upon their physical interactions. As we moved onto the Arboretum and left the trails, the boys moved to the front, fanned out and became focused on the world, functioning as scouts for the entire group. It felt like a band of primates moving across the savannah. The boys were turning wild, not wild in the sense of disruptive in the classroom but wild in the sense of some prehistoric programming reasserting itself.  Because of the lion article, I had this sense of these schooled boys growing up as zoo animals. The mind and body develop very differently in such a setting.