Excerpt from The Pet Book
The keeping of pets should provide the child with excellent training for making him responsible. To attain this he should have the entire care of the dependent creature. The chief advantage of this peculiar training and responsibility lies in the fact that the child loves the pet, and there is no training in thoughtfulness for others so educating as that attained through loving service.
If the child tires of a pet, it should be given to someone else, or chloroformed. It is a cruel act to make a pet dependent upon a careless or unloving master, and it teaches a child cruelty and hardness of heart to be obliged to give unloving care.
Pets are greatly needed in most homes these days, for this very purpose of developing responsibility in children, by giving them duties of real importance. In our present civilization there seems little enough to give a child the training that was so valuable to us who were fortunate enough to spend our childhood upon the farm, where a thousand little duties were constantly calling to us, and which, very early, impressed upon us the fact that this world did not exist for our selfish pleasure, but rather as an opportunity for us to exercise the helping hand; and that our importance in it was measured by our usefulness.
The keeping of pets should also be an education to a child in the matter of interesting him in other countries, through a study of his pets in their natural surroundings.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Pet Book (Classic Reprint)