Touch: Romanticised micro-moments from a farm kindergarten

Abstract

Focusing on two micro-moments between non-human animals and young human children in a Norwegian farm kindergarten, this article contributes to knowledge about pedagogical work with multi-species meetings. The micro-moments from a field study are discussed through an exploration and troubling of what we call our ‘romantic’ experience of the children's meetings with farm animals and our resistance to those feelings. We explore what we perceive as a mutual trust, curiosity and interest between the young children and the animals that we relate to Despret's concepts being polite and getting to know, and Haraway's concept companion species. Our discussion contributes an alternative perspective to the traditional view of children-animal relations.

Introduction

Being outside and with nature is a canonised idea in Nordic Early Childhood and Care (Kragh-Müller, 2017: 10). Farm kindergartens further extend the Nordic kindergarten tradition with Norwegian farming practices. In this article, we consider how ‘touch’ occurs at two meetings between children and animals at a farm kindergarten in Norway. The touch is discussed through what we describe as a ‘romanticising’ tendency, in contrast with ideas of non-innocent child-animal relations (Tammi et al., 2020).

Research about children's meetings with animals is flourishing in the field of education (e.g., Aslanian and Moxnes, 2021; Tammi et al., 2020; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019). Tammi et al. (2020: 1) argue that current studies about animals and children in education reproduce hierarchal and binary thinking concerning humans and animals. Perhaps legitimising these hierarchies, romanticised ideas of child-animal relations are often problematised, including ideas about ‘reinserting the child back into nature’ (Malone, 2016: 186) through Nature kindergartens. Some research problematises romanticised ideas about happy animals coexisting with joyful, playing, and happy children as is often visualised on posters, in popular culture and in children's books (e.g., Cole and Stewart, 2016) in kindergartens. Löwy and Sayre (2001) describe romanticism as ‘a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past’. In other words, romanticism is an idea of and a fond longing for what was better ‘before’(Malone, 2016). While romanticised ideas about nature and the child are criticised in research, the ideas form the foundation for many of today's early childhood pedagogical practices and can be traced to Rousseau's and Froebel's descriptions of children as a part of nature, and nature as an expression of the Divine from the Romantic era (Aslanian, 2023). Yearning with fondness for what was before (be it society before industrialisation or life before adulthood) involves an appreciation for and acknowledgement of the value of something, but also may occlude aspects of a thing or situation that contrasts or contests the romantic view, the non-innocent (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2012). The Cambridge English Dictionary suggests for example ‘idealisation’ as a synonym for ‘romanticising’. In this article, we address ‘the romantic’ as a way of seeing relationships between children and animals, that acknowledges and appreciates something special, but also occludes complexities involved that do not resonate with the romantic view. In this article, we use the idea of ‘romanticising’ both as a way to explore positive affects we experienced, and to trouble the same affects through thinking with Haraway (2008) and Despret (2015).

The data for this article build on the authors’ visits to three farm kindergartens in Norway. A farm kindergarten can be defined as a kindergarten sited on a farm, where the farming activities are part of the pedagogical activities the children are offered (Vedum et al., 2005). A farm kindergarten includes animals that are kept and tended outdoors as part of the kindergarten's daily pedagogical practice. We understand the farm kindergarten as romantic, as they hearken back to premodernity in Norway when most Norwegians relied on farming, fishing and hunting, in contrast to today, when only 2.5% of the population farm for a living (Ladstein and Skoglund, 2008). Farm kindergartens are constructed environments that are made to appear ‘natural’. In contrast to actual farms, the animals are not raised to be eaten or sold, but to please the children and provide an additional dimension to the pedagogic environment.

Some philosophy and some research perspectives on touch and child-animal relations to continue to think with

Haraway's (1997, 2008, 2016) philosophy and feminist practices grapple with everyday entanglements between human–non-human and more-than-human. To explore the complexities of the touch we witnessed and were involved in, we have looked to Haraway's understanding of humans and other animals as ‘companion species’. ‘To be one is always to become with many’ (Haraway, 2008: 4), and companion species leads the attention to the symbiotic relationships between us as humans and all critters surrounding us and making our world liveable. Furthermore, Haraway (Haraway, 2008: 17) explains companion species as ‘the patterns of relationality’ between different players. The patterns of relationality are how we respond to each other in the different situations we act in together. Haraway explains the relational drawing lines to Barad's (2007) concept ‘intra-actions’ and rethinking the many scales of space-time that are in play. Humans and the animals they live with are, according to Haraway, seen as ‘partners’, and the ‘partners do not precede their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with: those are the mantras of companion species’ (Haraway, 2008: 17). To become is, in this perspective, to become with many (skin cells, parasites, bacteria, farm practices, eating practices etc.), and the touch as such is a meeting that involves different species, becoming with each other, intra-acting at different scales and spaces.

Haraway (2008: 3) opens the book When Species Meet, asking, ‘Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?’ The touch moves in many directions, and inspires us to ask who touches whom when human children and non-human animals touch. Ideas about animals will dictate and affect the lives of humans and non-human animals through for example the laws and rules shaping human and non-human animal lives. With Haraway (2008), we understand touch as more than the meeting of space-bound, distinct forms, individuals or things in contact, but instead how the different scales of connection and activity in spacetime affect each other and bring each other into being (intra-action). Some examples of the connections of different scales of touch demonstrate the ways meetings between the children and animals build a foundation for how the children understand animals in the future.

Haraway (2008) further outlines touch as ‘the action in contact zones’. Contact zones are more than physical areas where points meet. Haraway (2008: 263) explains that touch is about being and writes ‘they touch; therefore, they are’. To touch is, according to Haraway (2008) to become with. We bring each other into being through our points of ‘touch’ and have therefore ‘epistemological-ethical obligations’ (Haraway, 2008: 26) to the animals we intra-act with. This includes all our thinking, all our touches, all our multiple and intra-connected doings as companion species. The circumstances and ideas involved in children's meetings with animals in childhood leads to the upholding or the changing of practices, such as the keeping, buying and selling of animals and the slaughtering and eating of farm animals. Each of these phenomena is in action with each together.

Touching non-innocent child-animal relations

Through touch we spawn new directions together. From touch follow obligations and responsibility, or response-ability, as Haraway (2008) suggests. A response-ability, or ability to respond, in the touch, for the one you touch. To enter the field of research concerning child-animal relations is to enter a variety of possibilities, and to play with others’ ideas and perspectives in construction of new or different knowledges.

Touching others research

Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019: 119) point out that through their ethnographical research they observed ‘young children are more likely to recognise the subjectivity in other creatures and to make connections with them in embodied and multisensory ways’. Bone (2010) addresses children's ability to meet animals in terms of the spiritual, understood broadly and influenced by an indigenous perspective of spiritualty as valuing the connectedness of all things (Bone, 2010: 249) and tending to children's particular desire and ability to empathise with animals.

Through touch we also address a non-innocent approach to relations between children, animals and nature which resists the temptation to romanticise and only see the warmth and magic of child-animal meetings. Child-animal relations involve death as well as life, a covering up as well as a lifting up, dissent and conflict (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2012). An example of care practices involving both death and life, Gressholmen is an islet in Oslofjorden, Norway, previously known for its many stray rabbits. The rabbits helped turn the islet into a tourist attraction, but their grazing behaviours led to erosion and destruction of the flora. To preserve the islet flora, it became protected in 2007, and the rabbits were killed. This story draws attention to the complexities of human, nature and animal touch. In Australia, Taylor (2019) writes about children's meetings with rabbits where the grazing rabbits pose the greatest threat to the ecological community. Young children inherit a troubling settler rabbiting legacy. Taylor (2019) does not frame the rabbit as the core of the problem and the threat, but the people. The touch we will discuss further becomes as such much more than just a nice and cosy relationship.

Malone (2016: 188) draws on Taylor (2011) who suggests a new form of political enquiry in order to resist romantic ideas about children and nature and give room for critical political enquiry that attends to the interconnectedness of common worlds. Both Malone (2016) and Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019: 1) refer to common worlds as ‘pluralist human and non-human communities’. Further Malone (2016) argues for critical political enquiry that attends to the interconnectedness of common worlds, communities between human and non-humans, challenging the field's reverence for Rousseau's idea of the ‘natural child’. Gressholmen can as such be an example of the child but also an idyllic island landscape as an interconnectedness, a common world, a world of companion species, disturbing the romanticised.

Furthermore, Cole and Stewart (2016) bring up points that contrast romanticised ideas when using the example of the animated children's film Chicken Run (Lord and Park, 2000), in which human behaviour against animals is the main problem. Cole and Stewart (2016) problematise how we raise human children, since children can easily transition from enjoying such a film as Chicken Run, a film highlighting animals’ perspectives on being farm animals, to enjoying a chicken meal. They problematise how adults can invite children to eat body-parts of dead animals, killed in comparable processes to those problematised in the film (Cole and Stewart, 2016).

Romanticised ideas about human-animal relations circulate alongside the ubiquitous presence of non-human animals in children's lives, a presence that is largely unaddressed by scholars in the social sciences (Cole and Stewart, 2016: 4). Building on this paradox, we address human-animal meetings, and invite some critical moments into our ‘romanticised’ memories of micro-moments of children touching and cuddling animals.

Methodological entrances

Haraway (2015) draws on Despret's (2006, 2015) politeness, and the human responsibility in being polite and getting to know, in meetings with non-human animals. Haraway (2015) describes this as to go visiting, an ethical perspective in meetings with other animals. Despret (2016) encourages polite curiosity when observing animals. This way of thinking with is about enlarging other players, humans as well as other animals. To think with challenges our behaviours in the various meeting-points with animals and children in the farm-kindergarten. It challenges us to ‘enlarge … the competences of all the players’ (Haraway, 2015: 5), which we aim to activate through focus on the touch we observed. We were observing, but we also took active-passive part, taking initiative, asking questions, but also waiting for children's initiatives (Lindquist and Moxnes, 2021). We communicated with children, cuddled animals who accepted our cuddles, and talked with teachers. At the same time, we were trying our best to jot down what we observed, what we were told, to take photos, and behave as politely as possible, and further follow Despret (2016: 141) to be obliged by the responses and guided by the responses the animals and children gave to each other through the touch. Working with Haraway (2008, 2015) and Despret (2006, 2015, 2016), we understand research as a non-innocent practice that requires us to think through our research over and over again. We challenge our own interpretations of meetings with farm-kindergartens, animals, children and employees and our reconstructions of notes into micro-moments.

Our use of to go visiting is inspired by Despret's (2006: 360) epistemological position of ‘the virtue of politeness’, which is to avoid constructing knowledge ‘behind the back’ of those being studied. This ethical notion is about allowing changes through asking questions about ‘what counts’ for the one being studied, which turned out to be helpful questions when discussing the two micro-moments. This is about a constant questioning of what counted for the rabbit, for the pony or for other animals and children we met. When exploring touch through micro-moments, such questionings force us into the micro of the event. Our time at the farm-kindergartens was far too short to enable ‘getting to know’ the children and animals. We can only ask how the children and animals ‘got to know’ each other, and how this ‘getting to know’ counted for both parties. Inspired by uncertainty, in what follows we try to connect ideas about ‘go visiting’, ‘getting to know’ and 'politeness’.

The empirical study

We took field notes and photographed some of the encounters that made impressions on us there and interviewed some of the teachers of the kindergartens. We are inspired by Davies (2014), Osgood and Giugni (2015), Moxnes and Osgood (2018), Moxnes and Osgood (2019), Moxnes (2022) and what they describe as stories, or micro-moments, to discuss from, or as active part-takers in discussions (Moxnes, 2022). By attending to micro-moments, the idea is to dwell with minor details of the stories. This is to better focus on the ‘extraordinary capacities children have’ (Davies, 2014: 15), or what extraordinary capacities children and animals have together in their meeting-points. Micro-moments occurred whilst also engaging in listening to children, interviewing teachers, and cuddling animals. Following situated encounters as this, the research proceeded by continuous analyses of micro-moments including moments when very young children got close to particular animals. The micro-moments we will discuss here involve touch between young children and animals, and the micro-moments we chose also touched us.

We had permission from parents, guardians, employees and the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (Sikt) to collect research materials, such as observations notes, sound recordings, interviews and photos. Parents, or guardians and employees, were informed about the study through an information letter distributed by the head teacher. When we arrived, only children where the parents (or guardians) have signed the permission slip and teachers who wanted to participate were outside with the farm-kindergarten animals. Immediately after the observations, we wrote the notes and soundtracks from interviews with teachers into a Word document. Photos, transcripts and notes were saved in the university's protected research desk.

A micro-moment, involving touch with children's tiny fingers, a food-kibble and a rabbit's teeth, and another touch, involving another child's fingers in meeting with a furry pony, awakened some romanticised wonders in us and pushed forward a curiosity for investigating these two micro-moments further. It is touch that can ‘pepper its partners with attachment sites for worldmaking’ (Haraway, 2008: 36). The two moments we soon will return to, fed our curiosity, since they seemed to create something more between the animals and the children, and we wonder whether what is happening within the micro-moments is a kind of worldmaking, thus involving responsibility in a wider sense than traditional pedagogical kindergarten practices. As researchers, our positive and ‘warm’ affective experience of the rabbit-child and pony-child touch contrasted our intellectual desire to not romanticise human-animal relations. This involves taking account of our affect-experiences along with our political and philosophical understandings, together with the urge to act and think response-ably, and with micro-moments, which poses new questions.

Child finger–food-kibble–rabbit-teeth micro-moment

We start with the following micro-moment:

A young child, approximately 18 months old, is finally allowed access to the rabbit-hutch. I (author 1) have been observing for several minutes together with the child and now it's this child's turn to enter the rabbits’ hutch. All the rabbits have been fed, and several children have been coming and going. One of the teachers sits on the floor, two older children are silently stroking each ‘their own’ furry rabbit. The young child is standing watching the scenario for some seconds, before laying their child-body flat down on the floor just in front of a rabbit. The rabbit is laying on the floor on its belly. The rabbit's two front feet are forming a ‘V’ shape in front of the child's torso. The other two feet are stretched out and gathered, pointing towards left. The child lays down on the floor and forms its arms and legs, shaping its body like the rabbit. The two are watching each other. Just breathing and watching. The teacher takes a food-kibble and lays the treat in front of the child's hand. Two small fingers grab on each side of the tablet and move the kibble close to the rabbit's face. The rabbit opens its mouth and bites over the opposite sides of the kibble from what the child's fingers are holding. The two seem to be watching each other, silently. The food-kibble is touching both fingertips and teeth. Nothing else is happening before the teacher says, ‘You have to say goodbye to the rabbits now since other children are waiting for their turn.’

Whom and what did the rabbit and the child touch? And, whom and what touched us? I (author 1) – was standing, watching and wondering. What was going on in that meeting-point between fingers, food-kibble and teeth? Was it something magical, or was I romanticising it? The touch in this story is touching different scales (Haraway, 2008). It is a physical touch between kibble, child and rabbit. Even though the child is not touching the animal directly, the skin cells on the child finger touch the food-kibble; the food-kibble consists of different proteins and carbohydrates. The kibble has been touched by other hands, for example, the teacher, with other skin cells, and traces from them are still on the kibble when the rabbit gets it and swallows it. On the rabbit's tiny teeth, there is saliva that touches the kibble. Does the saliva touch the child's fingers? And what if the child puts its fingers in its mouth? How does this mixture work together, become-with the moment, become companion species, or make the bond between the child and rabbit as, following Haraway (2008: 17), the fruit of becoming with, or a mutual trust? How does it feel for the child and the rabbit to be so still and so close? To become with is, according to Haraway (2008: 4), to become with many – we become with all that we touch when we touch something, also through breath, eye contact and sharing a common ground.

All the while, the child is shaping his body like the rabbit does. Bone (2010: 411) describes children's tendency to become animals through play as a spiritual practice described as metamorphosis, where ‘a visible infolding that melts the boundaries that have been constructed between human and animal … a moment of intersubjectivity to be celebrated’, and points to what Haraway (2008: 249) calls ‘the dance of world-making encounters’. Metamorphosis entails listening very carefully, a bodily listening – the silence between the two, just sounds of breath and the moment. These touches are one side of the micro-moment that highlights our feelings of touching into something magical. The child's imitation of the rabbit made us aware of how much this short micro-moment contains, as the child seems to show a desire and ability to get to know (Despret, 2015) the rabbit as a subject. However, the silence and watching was cut short by the teacher offering a kibble during a planned and controlled organisation of child-animal meetings, in part designed to protect the rabbits from too much stimulation, according to the teachers.

Haraway (2008: 19) writes, ‘I am who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind.’ We experienced being entangled and moved, through affects as sound of the breaths, smell of the rabbit hutch, or as a force, as an affective flow (Moxnes and Osgood, 2019), where we sensed the flowing together of animal, child, place, kibble and ourselves for some minutes. The romantic idea of a shared spark between children and nature (Froebel, 1826/2005) felt actualised for us then and there and echoed with Bone's (2010) description of children's ability to become animals in play as a spiritual experience. But did the magic, the spiritual and the romantic also act as a kind of blindfold, stopping us from seeing other moments, moments such as the rabbit's confinement, whether the rabbit's food was a healthy kind for the rabbit, or the teacher's control over the meeting between the child and rabbit? Did we only see what we find beautiful, rare and genuine? Another moment that opened up for us was the idea that children have more ability to meet animals in this way, and somehow are thus closer to nature. We wonder, don’t we have this same ‘spark’ in us? Are we not also part of the connected whole? Perhaps this resonance, and at the same time, a feeling of difference, is why we see the moment as special.

Shetland pony meeting child

A 15-month-old child and a Shetland pony stand in front of each other. Both walk the missing steps so they can stand close, close together. The Shetlander turns its head down, towards the tiny child's body. The child lifts her fingers and starts to make small, circular slow movements on the pony's leg. The pony's face is turned towards the child. The child's finger continues making the tiny, slow circular movements. The breathing of the pony is the only audible sound. The child turns its face to the pony. The pony's head is bent down close to the child, the child's face turned towards the pony.

According to one of the teachers, the child had a special interest for the particular pony since she started in the kindergarten. As far as we noticed, the pony did not show the same interest for the other children. In author 1's notebook, there is a remark: the pony seems very patient. Nevertheless, there is nothing about the pony turning its head towards other children, just our written comments when it happened with this child: the pony and child turn towards each other and look at each other. Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019), point out that younger children are more likely to recognise the subjectivity of other creatures than older children. Following these perspectives on subjectivity, we wonder whether this is about the young child recognising the subjectivity in the pony and the two making holistic connections together, recognising each other in embodied and multisensory ways. The pattern of relationality can go both ways and Despret (2016: 114) emphasises that observers often overlook animals’ active role in human-animal relations. We did not feel that we had the vocabulary to ask the child or pony what was in the situation for them, we only experienced what we understood as patterns of relationality. Did we miss something? Did we (and do we) romanticise the situation? Inspired by Despret (2016) we wonder if we could have got some answers if we knew how to ask the right questions. Turning the focus back to the micro-moment, where the child is touching the pony, and their faces are turned towards each other – something was produced, something happened between them, an intersubjective relationship between pony and child.

If we draw lines to Barad’s (2007) concept of ‘intra-actions’ – about a less linear concept of space-time at play – it takes us back to a ‘spark’ in us from our childhood memories from meetings with horses and the strange mixture of loving the horse and enjoying the embodied control over the animal, when horse-back-riding. What was the love we felt? What was in it for the horses we thought we were controlling? Did they love carrying us? Is an answer to all these questions connected to our experiences with animals in our early childhoods, when we experienced the animals as subjects but also as objects in our lives, as problematised by Cole and Stewart (2016).

Shetland pony fur touch child-hand, rabbit teeth–kibble–finger touch

To go visiting is not an easy practice (Haraway, 2015). The human-child struggle to imitate the rabbit, when entering the rabbit-house, can possibly shed light on what it might require, the sensing and responding to the other. Did the rabbit recognise the effort the 18-month-old put into the meeting, trying to shape their body in the same position as the rabbit? The human-child was perhaps practising curiosity, ‘to return one's ability to sense and respond’ (Haraway, 2015), acting as a guest, the young child seemed to be trying to be polite, turning itself into the posture of the host, the rabbit. Despret (2016: 19) helps us thinking further when she writes about a meeting between baboons and researchers, that ‘it is not the hosts who are required to be politely accountable as social beings but the observer’. The child as observers and visitors seems to grasp what Despret writes, about being polite, but also the rabbit or the pony's way of acting might be understood as deeply polite towards the children and a way of recognising the specific child.

Furthermore, Fredriksen (2019) suggests the importance of mutual trust, and how both animals and children first need to trust somebody to imitate their actions and then learn from them. The touch and gaze the child and Shetlander shared also relied on trust between the two parties. The creativity needed and the challenges due to body shape when interspecies imitate each other was also possibly visible through the gaze the pony and child shared and their heads turned towards each other.

Through our recorded interviews with teachers, we found that different romanticised discourses were used to promote the kindergarten and how they reasoned their choice for offering animals as a main part of their pedagogical work. Other discourses became visible when they told us about how they tried to protect the children from ‘hard’ facts about life and death. For example, a teacher told us they once had too many broiler chickens. During a holiday, they got someone to come and slaughter them. After the holiday they told the children that the animals were given away to another farm, where, as the teacher said, they got a much better life than what this farm-kindergarten could offer. The teachers sought to expose children to the beautiful side of life with animals and occlude the difficult side, such as the killing. Such knowledges entangle with the romanticised perspectives and force through questions about aspects of human–non-human relations we don’t like to think too much about, as husbandry, slaughter, hunting, farm-kindergartens as a form of animal captivity (Aslanian and Moxnes, 2021; Cole and Stewart, 2016). Uncomfortable affects are awoken and insist on drawing the outside (Moxnes and Osgood, 2019), unpleasant world into our romanticisation, disturbing the idyllic rabbit-child-pony touch.

Romanticism is, according to Malone (2016: 190), ‘to look to what we have lost’, a sentimental move backward, as a kind of new imagined future. Looking back on our observations at the farm-kindergartens, micro-moments of touch between children and animals that aroused memories and feelings of warmth, connection, magic and peace with animals from our childhood, as well as a feeling of no longer having access to these feelings, stayed with us. There were also other feelings of unease relating to the animals’ captivity, the control surrounding the children's visits with the animals, and stories of how the kindergartens slaughtered certain animals and sometimes hid this from the children. These circumstances also affected and infected the touch happening between children and animals.

Touching the cute charisma

Searching for something more makes us enter popular culture and pictures of cute animals. Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019: 120) write that it matters which animals draw which children into relationships, and that children's literature and popular culture play an active part in what kinds of animals we feel affections towards. Also here, in the farm-kindergarten, some animals seem to be more socially accepted, or have a ‘cute’ charisma (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019: 121). The cute charisma might influence which animals the children paid the most attention to, which was the same with very young children. When we observed, the situation was organised by the teachers and the kind of animals who were present in the farm-kindergarten and got most attention were the rabbits and the pony. Other animals, as the horny ram, hunting ewes on the field just outside the kindergarten got less attention, only from some of the older children when they were waiting for their turn to do horseback riding on the Shetland pony. There were several chickens, but the chickens fled when some children tried to lift them up for cuddles, and after a couple of tries children seemed to lose interest. We learned through our interview that the kindergarten had established systems so that children and animals could live well together (Haraway, 2008). For example, the rabbit house had an escape route to a special cage, if they did not want to engage with the children. The animals on the farm were handpicked and if an animal was too violent or wild, they were sold or slaughtered. Not all animals established bonds with children, and this again gives us some reasoning to stay with ideas that both cute charisma and different meetings matter. Human and animal lives are not necessarily harmonious, and the power of how animals matter in a farm-kindergarten is mostly controlled by humans.

Cute charisma or not, we draw attention to affects through sound. In both the animal-child micro-moments the only sound we could hear was the sound of breath. They were all breathing, all companion species – tied together through that sound. Despret (2016: 115) writes, ‘Lives that are, now more than ever, and for each of these animals, with us, lives with whom we have a role in their vulnerability.’ The human–non-human meeting was not an innocent happening, the past, present and future was all in this particular moment, entangled. Breath, eye contact, touch through a food-kibble, finger-fur contact, knowledge about which animals are more socially accepted than others, which animals are sold or slaughtered, which are still alive, still in the kindergarten – all mixed up. However, maybe we are just romanticising the ‘magic’ between children and animals, the idea that they are similar states of being and closer to nature (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019: 4).

Romanticised wonderings to continue wondering about

Taking a romantic look back, we ask why did these micro-moments affect us so deeply? How does human-animal, and especially child-animal, touch touch us? The magic, we wonder, may be the recognition of each other's mutual and equal multispecies subjectivity – momentarily erasing concurrent ideas about animals that objectify and reduce their being to something for humans. Despite the pedagogic intentions of animals as good for children, the actual meetings between young children and animals described in these two micro-moments seem to transcend instrumental intentions through becoming meetings between subjects, without other interests or intentions.

We have through the article asked several questions and tried to be somewhere in-between what romanticising and romantic does for the two micro-moments. If we do not talk about the romantic, blocking it out, we might miss something. The something is perhaps close to what Bone (2010: 411) describes as ‘a moment of intersubjectivity to be celebrated’, or the embodied and multisensory ways Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019: 119) point out as something young children are more able to grasp than others. Perhaps the romantic concept we search for here is something close to what Haraway (2008) describes as the more-than-human, pointing to connectedness between human, other critters, ecology, technologies and things, the natureculture, and that we all always are more than only human.

The micro-moments were a force in this article that we re-turned and that re-turned us (Barad, 2017). Our interpretations, perceptions and bodily experiences of the stories changed during the course of writing this article. We found that Despret's (2015) ideas of ‘getting to know’ and ‘politeness’ in the framework of Haraway's companion species slowly helped our vocabulary to ‘catch up’ to our layered and sometimes occluded affects relating to the micro-moments we chose to share. Our own tendency to ‘see the magic’ of the moments between animals and children we also doubted, because we feared we were romanticising it. Looking back, we find ideas about animals as objects, less than human and unnecessary to ‘get to know’ infiltrates our observations. The mattering of our past and childhood experiences now produce certain ideas about a pony or a rabbit, or a child, that cause the witnessing of intrasubjective meetings between these beings to shake something in us, long established ideas about distinctions between ourselves, animals and children. We have perhaps become more modest witnesses (Haraway, 1997), more aware of how we become with common worlds (Malone, 2016; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019).

Beyond the animals’ ‘role as facilitators or catalysts for children's development’ (Tammi et al., 2020: 1), we see how animals and children affect each other. There is clearly more in the meetings, than just development of children's sense of self. From this perspective education can also be about touching and recognising connectedness of all things (Bone, 2010: 249), including subjectivity in other creatures. The recognition we witnessed between children and animals might be what made these two micro-moments so important for us to write about. Taking our experience of ‘the romantic’ seriously, we both explored and challenged the affects the two micro-moments produced in us. We are left with having witnessed a mutual trust, curiosity and interest between the young children and the rabbit and pony, that seemed to merge – through a mutual attitude of ‘go visiting’ and ‘politeness’, knotted with the animals’ captivity, with the human control of the environment – countless scales of touch.