THERE’S really no way to know: most psychology research about kids and animals dissects children’s one-to-one relationships with pets, not their abstract feelings about wildlife or the many representations of it they encounter. The best investigation of those vicarious relationships I found dates from 1983. That was when Stephen R. Kellert, a social ecologist at Yale, and Miriam O. Westervelt, of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service interviewed kids at 22 schools in Connecticut, in grades 2 through 11, to gauge their attitudes toward wildlife. What they discovered is an obvious but deflating truth: little kids are like animals, too necessarily consumed by their own interests to register much concern or compassion for other animals in the abstract.

Kids under the age of 6 especially “were found to be egocentric, domineering, and self-serving,” Dr. Kellert later wrote, summarizing the study. “Young children reveal little recognition or appreciation of the autonomous feelings and independence of animals” and “also express the greatest fear of the natural world.” It was the younger kids, not the 8th or 11th graders, who were more likely to believe that farmers should “kill all the foxes” if a particular fox ate their chickens; that it’s O.K. to slaughter animals for fur coats; that most wild animals are “dangerous to people”; and that all poisonous animals, like rattlesnakes, “should be gotten rid of.” It was the younger kids who were more likely to agree with the statement “It’s silly when people love animals as much as they love people,” whereas virtually none of the teenagers believed it was silly. Most second graders agreed with the statement “If they found oil where wild animals lived, we would have to get the oil, even if it harmed the animals.” Eleventh graders overwhelmingly did not.

“Our society frequently romanticizes young children’s attitudes toward animals,” Dr. Kellert has written, “believing that they possess some special intuitive affinity for the natural world and that animals constitute for young people little friends or kindred spirits.” But the data was clear: the younger the kids, the more “exploitative, harsh and unfeeling” they were — the more their relationship to wildlife was based on the satisfaction of “short-term needs and anxiety toward the unknown.” Older kids wanted to go camping in wildlife habitats; younger ones wanted “to stay where lots of other people were.”

We like to imagine our children as miniature noble savages, moving peacefully and naked among the beasts. But they’re more like the colonists: greedy, vindictive, wary, shortsighted and firing panicky musket shots at any rustling in the woods. It’s not their fault. They are behaving like children.

And maybe, I’ve come to realize, that’s exactly the point. It may not matter whether the connection between children and animals is real or imagined; if watching my daughter chase butterflies on a sunny day feels so good and life-affirming because she’s fulfilling some innate impulse — momentarily finding her ecological niche — or only because she’s fulfilling some wistful, pastoral fantasy of mine. Maybe it’s a little of both. Maybe, as with so many parenting questions, the truth gets lost in that mysterious wilderness between our children’s identities and the ones that we are urging them toward.

Ultimately, all these animals that we fill our children’s lives with — the frustrated goats who learn to compromise, the worried skunk who makes it through her first day of school, the teddy bear that needs to be hugged and tucked in — are also just proxies. They are useful, adorable props, props that we sense command our kids’ attention in some deep, biophilic way. And so we use them to teach our children basic lessons of kindness or self-possession or compassion — to show our kids what sort of animals we’d like them to grow up to be.