ONE of the wonderful things about working part-time in a bookshop is that it provides a lustrous wallpaper to your day’s thoughts.

You cannot move about without having lots of lovely stimulus for your brain and soul. Facts, questions and provocations everywhere, as part of the place as dust and air.

Perhaps because I have been off meat for quite a while, and because I am doing Veganuary to test how much (or how little) I really need animal-related products in my life, I looked at the kids’ table differently for the first time yesterday.

Almost all the books were stories about animals.

Other tables for younger and older children are similarly stocked by fauna.

The boardbook animal stories of Julia Donaldson with illustrations by Axel Scheffler, the excellent classic prose of Dick King-Smith, the wonderful humanity-stirring novels of Michael Morpurgo. So somany books. I’m surrounded by them. We all are.

These books enter our lives, even if we only become aware of the film versions.

(Babe is just one of the examples that has made me cry recently. Thanks Dick for the Sheep Pig original.)

They are proof of our enduring love, rippling fascination, and stalwart loyalty for other creatures. Of our sense of a rightful equality amongst the species.

They are colourful trophies of all that is best about that most “sophisticated” of animals, humans.

We teach our children to love, empathise and characterise animals from the youngest age. We grow up with parables, cautionary tales, wonders of escapism, laugh-out-loud antics, all coloured by the exoticism of countless species that represent our brilliant earth.

We choose these animals to represent facets of ourselves – slothful, fox-like cunning, bear-hugging, owl-wise, survivor cats, loyal hounds, the list is endless.

We use them for wonderful things as well as diabolical things. Magic and cruelty. We choose them to inform, entertain, and inspire.

Our humanity and response to the world, prioritised even ahead of learning numbers and letters, is developed by nurturing our own humanity in direct relation to non-humans.

These stories are potent and magical and memorable enough for a lifetime’s worth of learning and nostalgia because the characters are animals. They are not us. We bore us a lot of the time. We need animals to keep things fun.

Would the Tiger Who Came to Tea have been an evergreen bestseller since the Sixties if the tiger had been a human visitor?

Would Charlotte’s Web be the blub-inducing classic of friendship if it wasn’t about a pig and a spider (amid the threat of the pig’s slaughter)?

Would the pictures be as fun if Eric Carle had picked a boy as his subject of hunger and not a caterpillar?

Would we have wailed out the harrowing results of Watership Down if it had not had bunnies in it? (A human aside on this – would Art Garfunkel then have had the hit Bright Eyes with which to give Paul Simon a good knee in the nads for stealing all the ruddy thunder all the time?)

Our diets and books are chosen for us by our parents at a young age.

The age of the Hungry Caterpillar and the Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit and Stuart Little.

Most of us grow as accustomed to ameat component in our meals as we do to these fantastic stories becoming a part of our imagination.

It seems so strange to me, thinking of it now. We teach our children to love, but then we teach them to kill.

As we grow older we get to choose the books we think are magical or have value, and we get to choose our diets. We get to think for ourselves, and choose. And that, like all great stories – and life is a story we all are writing, together – is worth remembering.