How Could I Forget?

Just a quick rant. We were at the Ecotarium (our home away from home) the other day, and we were looking at the African animals. To be clear, there are dioramas with taxidermied specimens mixed in with painted representations of other animals that would live with the taxidermied animals in real life. Alex has seen them many times and has a somewhat vague grasp of what's going on. As in, these animals were alive, now they're just stuffed skins to represent the actual animal, to be quite unromantic about it.

Well. Enter the 2 young girls with their father/grandfather. (It's dark in there, and he looked older. Doesn't matter.) These girls had to be at least 10 years old. The first words oout of one of their mouths was, "Oh wow, it's all 3-d in here!". She. Thought. The. Animals. Were. 3-D. Pictures. Seriously??!!??!! Then adult started to explain that they were in fact, real skins. (Having just read a fabulous book about taxidermy, I won't even get started about whether these animal representations were the actual impala, nyala, kudu, and dik dik skins or some other skin made to look like them. But I digress.) So, the brain child of the two says something to the effect of, "Or they could even be dead animals!". Gee, you think? Here I was assuming that the animals that never moved, have glass eyes, a few visible stitches where they've been patched together and who are in glass cases were real, live animals who never eat, drink, moves, breath or blink. Silly me.

I can't even comprehend how this could happen. Are there no field trips to museums any more? Do no parents take their kids to the museum -and- explain what they're looking at? I mean, come on. You don't have to know how to stuff a squirrel to be able to say, "That's a stuffed squirrel." and tell your kid the difference between alive and dead. It's not rocket surgery, parents, grandparents and other "responsible" adults. My three-year old should not be more educated about the fine art of taxidermy than your middle schooler.

Then again, maybe I'm the strange one for teaching my kid about everything I know. Craziness.