Christine Mott, Author, Attorney and Animal Rights Activist

Elysabeth: I want to bring on today’s guest, Christine Mott. Christine, thanks for being with me today.

I love that you chose children’s books as a way of helping younger generations see this. So you mentioned this is for the parents as well, because I want the parents to read it, but I really think children’s books are a great way to help shape society. So I wondered if that was a conscientious choice in your writing…

Christine Mott: Absolutely. I mean, there’s so many horrific examples of violence towards animals, towards people, towards our planet, and if you’re a sensitive person like we are you can be left feeling like, “How in the world do you begin to tackle these immense issues that we deal with?” For me, maybe it sounds very simplistic, but I think it boils down to something as simple as the golden rule and teaching compassion to children.

Everything is related, right? So if we can teach children that maybe that message will build on and they will have compassion for not just this one bird in the store, but they can open up their hearts and say, “All animals have feelings like me. He felt scared. He had a dream. I have a dream. Other animals’ feelings should matter to me.”

I think maybe not at age four. Maybe it will take longer, but at some point my hope is that it will allow this domino effect where probably just like you and I as children, at some point you will say, “Well, why? If I don’t think it’s okay for people to make Flaco feel sad, why is it okay for someone to do that to another animal? That’s an animal that we typically eat, an animal that we typically use for animal testing or some other horrible use in our society.” I hope that it can build on there.

At the same time as a children’s book, and I say this as a mom who has read hundreds or maybe thousands of books at this point, it’s a really delicate balance of doing this kind of messaging in a children’s book. In the first instance, you want someone to want to buy that book. It’s not the child. It’s a caregiver, a parent, or someone who’s giving it. Once that book is in the home or the library or wherever, you want people to actually want to read it, and that’s both the children and the adults.

I had personally had the experience of being gifted or purchasing myself other children’s books that had a great message and I totally aligned with the pro-animal message but it’s been done in a way that my children don’t want to read that story. It’s too scary and it’s too sad. It’s not the type of book you want to read to your child at bedtime because it doesn’t have a happy ending and that’s a no-go. We’ve reached a dead end at that point, right? You write that book but you have no audience. No one wants to buy it and no one wants to read it.

So the challenge for me was how do I create a story that’s captivating and entertaining for children and their parents or caregivers, and yet is able to eloquently articulate this important message that I want to convey. I hope that I have achieved that, and so the way I framed it in my mind was planting a seed versus hitting somebody over the head with messaging. I think, to me, that’s the best way to do it in a children’s book.