Lyndsay shared how children often respond to snails, which are common in the area because of the waterways running through the city. She described how children would pick them up and placing them gently into pockets or tossing them into nearby ravines to protect them from being stepped on or run over. There was care in these gestures. But there was also something else taking shape. Children were making sense of safety through human terms. Paths became dangerous because they belonged to feet. Roads became dangerous because they belonged to cars and buses. Ravines, which children themselves could not easily access, became imagined as safe because they sat outside the flow of human movement.
I found myself asking: what assumptions are being made about where these creatures belong? What counts as safety? Who decides?
The caterpillar pushed the question beyond how to teach children about insects and toward how to remain with more-than-human life without reducing it too quickly to danger, to fact and to rescue. What would it mean to stay with curiosity a little longer?
To notice before naming.
To watch before deciding.
To ask what kinds of relations become possible when I/we resist the urge to place a creature where I/we think it belongs.