Most of our Children were born in Warsaw. Many have never spent a week in the countryside. Some have never been to any farm or any agritourism stay. The world they know up close ends at the corner of the street, in the nearby park, on the playground in front of their block. They know the trees. They know the lawn. They know the squirrels. But a real goat, looking them in the eye, with a warm soft side covered in hair — most of them have so far seen only in a cartoon.
One September morning a small farm rolled into our preschool. In transport crates came ducks, hens, a proud rooster, a gentle dog — and a goat. A real, live, bleating goat with a muzzle that nibbles at a carrot. Our Krasnoludki met a world that generations of their great-grandparents knew as everyday — and that the generation of their parents almost no longer knows.
This article is about what happens in such a moment. What happens in the head of a six-year-old who places their hand on the goat’s neck for the first time in life. What happens in the head of a four-year-old who gives the rooster a grain of corn and feels the warm beak peck their fingers. What happens in the head of a three-year-old who is at first afraid of the duck, and ten minutes later laughs when it pecks at their shoe.
A world the city has lost
Let us begin with the context, because without it it is hard to appreciate why such a visit in a city is so important. Three generations ago, a Polish Child — including the city Child — had regular contact with farm animals. Grandma lived in the countryside. Grandpa kept hens. The cousins milked a cow. Around the city there were beehives, pastures, family farms. Praga Południe itself, as late as the 1930s, still had fields, gardens, small livestock. A Warsaw Child grew up among animals even when living in a tenement.
That world is gone today. The average Warsaw child encounters a live farm animal a few times in their life — at the zoo, on a special class trip, sometimes during a holiday visit to grandparents, if those still keep something. Most of the contact with animals in their life happens through a screen. A cartoon about a goat. A short clip about hens. An educational app in which one taps a drawn chick that emits a plastic sound.
From the point of view of a Child’s development, this is an enormous loss. A Child who has never had the chance to touch a living creature larger than themselves, with warmth, smell, breath, twitching muscles — does not build the same brain representations of the world as a Child who has had that experience. Something is missing. Something hard to name, but felt at once when one places them next to a goat.
In our preschool, aware of this gap, we regularly invite animals to ourselves. Sometimes a wild animal from a rescue, like an owl or a hedgehog. Sometimes farm animals — like this time. And every time we see the same effect: the Child is held still in time for a moment. They watch. They listen. They touch. They feel. And something changes in them.
What the herd actually did
The visit was well prepared — it was not chaos. The animals arrived with a keeper who knows each one by name, who knows how to handle each, when one does not want to be touched, and when it invites contact. The Children, in small groups, approached one after another. First, observing from a distance. Then a slow approach. Then a touch — only if the animal agreed.
The dog allowed petting of its fur. The Children learned that you stroke a dog from the nose toward the tail, not the other way round. That you do not grab the ears. That a dog wagging low is not the same as one wagging high. These are details that in adult life we learn through mistakes — a Child who learns them in preschool walks into adulthood with this as natural knowledge.
The hen was cautious. The rooster — self-assured. The Children learned to observe differences. Why does the rooster puff up and crow, while the hen does not? How does the rooster know to protect the hens? Questions came of themselves, one after another. These are moments in which the Child, of their own accord, builds a picture of the animal world, of its hierarchies, of its behaviours. This cannot be conveyed through a multimedia presentation. This has to be seen.
The ducks — that was the element that delighted them most. Because the ducks, unlike the hens, came up close, pecked at shoes, splashed in a basin of water set on the carpet. For Children who until now had only seen ducks at the edge of a Warsaw pond, ten metres away, it was a lesson: a duck up close is an entirely different animal. Plush, but quick. Gentle, but bold. Quiet, but capable of complaint.
And the goat. That was the highlight. The goat treated our visit with the loftiness of a property owner — walking slowly, looking around, taking the carrot from the Child’s hand as though doing them a favour. Some Children approached with fear (horns! a clinking bell! the size!). Others, without warning, immediately wrapped their arms around it and pressed their face into its warm side. The goat bore everything with a dignified calm, as though long accustomed to such emotion.
What a Child builds when they touch a real animal
The first layer is obvious — knowledge. A Child who has stroked a goat knows what a goat looks like, smells like, sounds like, how it walks, what it eats. This is encyclopaedic knowledge that one can theoretically pick up from a book — but experienced in real contact, it is recorded in the brain in an entirely different way. More durably. More fully.
The second layer is less obvious — sensory input. Contact with a living animal is a bombardment of the senses: the touch of fur, the warmth of a body, smell (sometimes unpleasant, but real), sounds, movement. The city Child lives in a sensorily impoverished environment — concrete, plastic, silicone, screen. Every such contact is nourishment that the Child’s brain needs. A brain built on rich sensory experience works differently, better, more plastically — that is now well documented.
The third layer — and to us the most important — is empathy. A Child who stands face to face with another living creature feels the fact that they are dealing with someone. Not something. Someone. The goat looks. The hen pecks. The duck wonders. The dog understands. Each of these animals has its own subjectivity, its own pace, its own whims. A Child who plays with an animal for an hour begins to see this for themselves. And that seeing stays with them.
Research on children’s empathy clearly shows that Children with regular, close contact with animals later in life display higher empathy not only towards animals, but towards people. This is not obvious — one could imagine that empathy towards animals does not transfer to empathy between humans. But it does. Apparently a Child practising the recognition of needs and states of another being trains a capacity that is later used in interpersonal relationships too.
Fear worth walking through
Not all the Children want to touch right away. That is very important and we never force them. Some Children come closer after a few minutes. Some only touch through the carer’s hand. Some do not touch at all and only observe from a safe distance — and that too is a fully valid experience.
But we often see something beautiful. A Child who at the start was afraid of the duck, the rooster, the goat — by the end of the visit stands next to the animal with shining eyes and tells Mum at pickup that “this is my goat, she knows me and I like her”. What happened in the meantime? The Child went through the fear. They checked that what frightened them was in reality gentle. They gave themselves a chance. And won.
This is an experience the city Child often does not have in other circumstances. Fear of the unknown. Checking. Overcoming. The triumph of their own courage. These are processes that build self-confidence more deeply than any praise. And contact with an animal gives the Child the chance to live them — in safe, controlled conditions, but with real exposure to the unknown.
Care that cannot be taught
After the visit all our groups got a homework — to draw their favourite animal from the visit. No one gave instructions that it had to be the goat. No one suggested the rooster. Each Child chose for themselves. The result? All the animals were represented. Each Child had their own. And the drawings were not anonymous — names appeared, dialogues, scenes.
This is important, because it shows that the visit was not, for the Children, a spectacle to watch. It was an encounter with specific creatures. Each Child remembered something that mattered to them. Each Child formed a relationship — short, fleeting, but real. And this is the element which in pedagogy we call “relational learning” — learning through relationship, not through instruction.
A Child who spent an hour in relationship with a goat begins to treat the goat as someone. Begins to ask whether the goat had eaten. Whether the goat is warm. Whether the goat had water. These questions do not appear before the visit — they appear after. These are the first specks of care which later cluster into an attitude. And an attitude of care for the weaker is what our world today most needs.
What a Parent can do
The simplest thing — look for opportunities. An agritourism farm for the weekend. An ecological farm near Warsaw with open doors. A wild park where you can feed Polish ponies. A reserve with bison. Local stables holding open days. Every such contact is a deposit into the Child’s sensory and empathic account.
You can also start at home. Keeping a small animal — even a hamster, a guinea pig, fish — is the Child’s first practical lesson in caring for the weaker. A Child who in the morning checks whether the hamster has water learns something no book can teach. Daily, small, invisible-to-anyone care. That is the foundation of adult maturity.
And one more thing — please do not be too quick to rescue animals from the Child. A dog asking for peace will move away itself. A hen unwilling to be touched will run off itself. A Child who reads the animal’s signals learns by themselves to respect its limits. But for that they need to have a chance to read those signals. The intervention of an adult who pulls a hen out of a Child’s hands “because she might bite” takes that lesson away.
What this is all for
Because the Krasnoludki walk into next week of preschool with something that cannot be bought. Each of them carries in memory a specific creature — Marudka the goat, Stefan the rooster, Little Duck. Each of them remembers what a hen smells like, how warm a dog’s back is, how heavy a goat is when it leans into your shoulder. These memories are indelibly recorded.
We hope that in ten, twenty, thirty years one of our Krasnoludki, walking past the fence of some farm, will stop and say to their child — “come, look, a goat, just like the one I saw at preschool”. And that this gesture will be the first link in a new chain. That the grandchildren of our Krasnoludki will also know what a goat smells like.
And if even one of our Krasnoludki girls in thirty years becomes a vet, a biologist, a shelter carer, an ecologist defending the wild — then this September morning, when she touched a goat for the first time in her life, will have had its share in it. And nobody will ever know. But we will know.