386 | Museums and Representation of Animals nature monuments to human creations, concerns, collections, curiosities, explorations, memories, and attitudes Even the most enlightened museum starts with the assumption of the primacy of the human animal For our purposes here, the term museum includes art museums and galleries, natural history museums, history museums, historic houses, living history sites, children’s museums, science centers, zoos, nature centers, and aquaria In art museums around the world, museum educators create tours called some variation of “Animals in Art” for school groups Their docents troop these youngsters through their collections in a glorified scavenger hunt, as little ones gleefully point out the animals they spot While sometimes these tours take the time to compare the elongated arms of the monkeys in a Chinese screen to the elongated necks of sculpted folk art birds for weathervanes or decoys, mostly they not connect the dots beyond “Miss, I see one!” With the youngest groups, they avoid a bronze depicting animal savagery or Francis Bacon’s terrifying dog, leaning far more heavily on richly painted depictions of Aesop’s fables and versions of Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom, more acceptable, non-nightmare-inducing material To some, this find and name process appears to be no more than youthful hunting, or a form of animal watching without any context What attitude to the art, to the animals does it seek to engender in children? The differences between George Stubbs’ horses, Alexander Calder’s lions, and Northwestern Native raven masks are rarely discussed While formalist concerns come to the fore with older students and adults, attitudes toward animals as evidenced within the works of art remain largely ignored Even the most overtly political contemporary artists, such as Sue Coe or Walton Ford, are approached aesthetically, biographically, and contextually, within the framework of contemporary art Meanwhile in parts of museum collections, like those of indigenous peoples, where adults could, if “Animals in Art” were revisited, look closely at the symbolic, totemic, and narrative, recurring imagery is usually thought too simplistic Turtles, frogs, lions, dogs, and snakes go uncommented on, other than for their incorporation as design elements For many adults, museum memories relate to natural history museum visits Of those, the memory may be of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and specifically the center floor diorama of elephants that seem to dash from one end of the room to the other, majestic, terrifying, and, in the true sense of the word, awesome Some may remember a sleepover under the whale And though dinosaurs are ever popular, the art of the diorama, more than just the bones, is effective theater, and those charging elephants, not behind glass, but inhabiting the room, are startling enough to stick in the memory But museums in their texts and subtexts present more attitudes about animals than simply what a child, still determining alive from dead, real from fake, can perceive For adults, museums present a broad spectrum of views about animals While art museum depictions indicate attitudes that range from symbol and story to dominion and possession, there is also evidence of kinship, wonder, and catalog, as well as extensions of symbol to include totem, logo, and pure pattern and design