Chapter 7 postscript

In the early 20th century, Canada produced some of the world's greatest animal storytellers.Margaret Marshall Sanders and "Father of Canadian Poetry" Charles G. D．Roberts is one of them.The former's novel "Beautiful Joe" (1894) is still popular; the latter's animal stories outsell his poems.Neither of them, however, achieved the international fame that Ernest Thompson Seaton achieved.Seton's "Sitdon's Animal Tales" - with the possible exception of Kipling's "Wildwood Tales" - is the world's most beloved collection of stories about animals in nature.

Sidon was a different character.Although many of his biographers have portrayed him as vain, stubborn, and selfish in pursuing what he thought was right, they also agree that he was also capable of generosity.Seton made enemies on many fronts, yet even his enemies had to acknowledge his importance as an environmentalist, activist and author.He was an idealist who was far more progressive than most of his contemporaries on issues of social justice.For example, he was deeply concerned that the goodwill of some missionaries and the practice of placing Indian children in boarding schools would destroy Indian culture and self-esteem.Seton had expressed this concern a century earlier, and later events proved his foresight.

Seton admired the management system and social organization of Indians, which prompted him to set up an organization called "Indian Forest Knowledge Study Group", which mainly served the lower class. It was originally set up exclusively for boys. It was quickly expanded to include girls as well.It is worth noting that this organization does not advocate competition among members, although they expect each child to work hard on their own and give full play to their expertise.The trainees design their own clothes and work according to their ability.Seaton even wrote a book called "The Indian Woods Knowledge Draft," outlining the rules of his organization.His organization had been an instant success in the United States, but less so when it tried to introduce it to the United Kingdom.The British are less eager than the Americans to make their children imitate the Indians.Seton collaborated with Lord Baden-Powell, as Baden-Powell had already set up an organization to train Boy Troops.Baden-Powell adopted most of Seton's ideas and approach to the game, but also introduced competitive mechanics, paramilitary institutions and clothing, and military terminology.The two battled for years, and in the end, unfortunately, Baden-Powell's little Boy Scouts won over Seaton's socially conscious Indian Woods study group.

Yet Sidon is remembered not so much for his achievements in social engineering as for his work as a naturalist and his moving stories of wild animals.Even in both, however, his relationship to ecology was always prominent, and his animal stories were always motivated by moral motives. Ernest Thompson Seton was born Ernest Iwan Thompson in South Shields, England in 1860, the twelfth of fourteen children. The family immigrated to Canada in 1865, where Ernest lived first in Lindsay, Ontario, and then grew up in Toronto.It is said that he was very intelligent when he was a child, but he was irritable, vain, and eager for praise and glory.He began studying nature in and around Toronto at a very young age - at the age of fifteen he began compiling his own Index of Canadian Birds, a project that, while necessary, showed Seaton as an amateur conceited.He began his painting career, studying in Toronto and London.He hated his father so much that he left home at every opportunity to go to his brother Arthur, who had settled down with the Caberian family in Manitoba.Before going there, like another British-born naturalist, Gray Wolfe, he changed his name.In this way, he became Ernest Thompson Seton. "Sidon" also helps to satisfy Ernest's sense of arrogance by showing his distant ancestors to be Scottish nobles.

Perhaps it was Sidon's sense of destiny that prompted him to complete his life's work.His exhaustive notebooks of natural creatures, his illustrations, his detailed illustrations, made him the most eminent naturalist of his day, though he had no scientific training.From 1882 to 1885 he spent some of his happiest years in the Carberry Mountains of Manitoba.There, he was a shaggy-haired, ragged eccentric who haunted the mountains with a portfolio and notebooks.While the farmers were at work, he painstakingly counted the feathers on one bird: 4,915 in all. After that period in Manitoba, he wrote some of his most famous books.He published four volumes of "Life of Prey" with more than 1,500 detailed and accurate illustrations.Wrote a paper entitled "The Birds of Manitoba", which provided an important reference for Percy A. Taverner's "The Birds of Canada", and he also published a The classic essay on nature, "The Life of a Grouse". In 1892, the government of Manitoba appointed him "Provincial Naturalist," a false title, but one that gave Seton a prestige not afforded by his former amateur status.Most importantly, he has used his experience over the years to write several excellent books such as the collections of stories "The Wolf of Winnipeg" and "The Trail of the Dune Stag" and the collection "The Animal Tales of Sidon", here The book established his reputation and established his future life path.

The Animal Tale of Sidon was published in 1898 and was a huge success.It gave Seton a measure of financial independence, and it won him the friendship of Theodore Roosevelt.Rudiyat Kipling is said to have been inspired by this book to write his own Tales from the Wildwood. In his opening Preface, Seton bluntly asserts: "These stories are true." He goes on to state that, while not consistently adhering to historical truth, he believes in a higher truth of particular individual details, namely The higher truth of the story of a splendid animal.In doing so he declared himself in favor of realism in literature, which aimed at examining specific, individual, idiosyncratic details rather than creating "types."In fact, Seton was one of Canada's first realist writers.The realist movement became active only in the 1920s through the works of Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostanzo, Robert J. West Steed, and others.

Seton insisted on the moral implications of his collection.He said: "Animals don't lack all the things that humans have. What animals have is also shared by humans to a certain extent. Since animals are all sentient beings, they only have the same degree of difference as us. There are differences, so they should have their rights as a matter of course.” Just as he defended Indian culture, he also defended the rights of animals, which fully demonstrated his modern consciousness.Even today, his insights would be considered farsighted. The stories in "The Animals of Seton" are fascinating not only because of their attention to vivid detail, but also because of the heroic characters of the animals.Every animal has a name, which gives it its own personality.Each animal is larger than the original, and a superior animal plays out a tragedy, because, as Sidon points out: "The life of a wild animal always ends in tragedy."

In pursuit of a higher truth, Seton is not afraid to exaggerate the truth of details.The number of sheep killed by Lobo is obviously exaggerated.The skill of the sauntering wild horse is also far-fetched.Nevertheless, there is something in these stories that convinces us deeply.They are highly dramatic stories, because life itself is an adventure. In Seton's story, the distance between the author and the narrator is not great.Clearly, Seton wanted to mythologize his animals along with himself, so the stories all take autobiographical form.A sharp-eyed man can certainly tell at length about the life of an animal, intervene in it, and imagine what he cannot see.The model of his imagination is his assumption that man and animal belong to the same family.Animals feel and act like humans, only in limited ways.This brought Seton close to the anthropomorphic danger line, but he stepped on it cautiously.The characters in his stories are not just people in animal clothes, like Walt Disney's animals.Nor are they, as is the case in the plethora of sentimental stories, vehicles for conveying Christian allegory; on the contrary, they live the lives of animals, always miserable, as close to our own as we would like to admit.

Sidon can also show that animals are sometimes superior to humans. The narrator in "Lobo, Great King of Curumpore" himself has lost all sympathy with the human point of view. The death of "Sister Bai" was terrible.The mild guilt of the storyteller serves only as a harsher indictment, and Lobo's post-capture dignity seems a model of heroism. One might accuse Seton of making sentimental or patently wrong insights.No one else among researchers has found a convincing instance of an animal committing suicide ("Wandering Mustangs"), dying of a broken heart ("Lobo, King of Culumbo"), or Euthanasia in "Izumibara Fox". The mysterious life and evil heart of "Woolly" is the stuff of many nightmares.Yet personal observation is so careful, and it tells us such a profound story, that it would be too demanding not to forgive occasional excesses.

"Sidon's Animal Story" came out very early, and since then Sidon has started a long and outstanding career, drinking with important people, receiving warm welcome wherever he speaks, and becoming an idol in people's minds. These glories are unimaginable to naturalists today.Nothing he did, however, surpasses this early work.The stories in this collection are classics of the genre, and they are the yardstick by which all other works, present and future, are measured.