I was reading my old Dr. Seuss books to my son a few months ago and came across those depictions, so the announcement to stop publishing the book made sense to me. I had been debating about censoring my copy to skip the worst pages.
I'm not sure if we'll ever come back to that book (it's part of an anthology) but if we do it'll be when he's old enough to understand a conversation about why it's not okay. And then we'll skip the pages, because the book is better off without them anyway.
Related: loved the Narnia books when I was a kid. Had a hard time not being put off by "A Horse And His Boy" when I re-read it as an adult (one of my favorites as a kid, BTW).
Perhaps that is why they sloughed off making the films.
We don't, but that's another conversation altogether. We've been trying to avoid screen time because he's only nine months old.
When he does get old enough to watch movies, I can't reasonably expect to keep him from watching or reading things. If he doesn't see them with us, he'll see it at friends' or grandparents' houses, but either way we'll have to talk with him about what he's seeing.
Disney movies are a great example of something a lot of people seem to remember as harmless and fun, but they pretty much all contain at least some problematic and/or scary elements to varying degrees.
>It's depressing to me that some people think that we should keep teaching this stuff to kids.
The concern is not that people want to continue using I ran the Zoo as a educational tool.
The concern is ebay is weighing in to say they know better than parents how to educate their children. OR that eBay is weighing in that they know better than collectors what books are suitable for purchase.
Some people find it presumptuous, patronizing, and concerning that eBay wants to make these decisions for individuals.
Wikipedia wasn't of much use. It was secondary details and not primary details. I personally wasn't able to see the controversial content and able to make up my own mind and without primary material to judge, I can't in good conscience judge the content. To do otherwise is prejudicial.
Moreover, consider the appalling anti-Japanese political cartoons that Dr. Seuss made during WWII. Is there no merit in seeing the flaws of someone we otherwise hold in such high regard? And to understand that maybe something broke in the minds of otherwise nice people when a little incident at Pearl Harbor happened? We're worried about the traumas that words might inflict, but we seem to be discarding the trauma of war and history to do it. These are important discussions we need to have, but people are too scared to have them. It's easier to ban books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Ran_the_Zoo#Criticism
I've owned copies with these pages. It's depressing to me that some people think that we should keep teaching this stuff to kids.