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On this beastly, grizzly, hawkish two-hander, off-duty dads Jordan Stokes and Pete Fenzel ride the tiger of discourse through zoologically- and conservationally-minded children’s cartoons, with a focus on PBS Kids’ long-running cybernetic animal rescue fantasy, Wild Kratts.

The duo consider how Wild Kratts frames moral imperatives about the treatment of animals in the wild, while depicting few if any pets or livestock, and how that might identify evil in its exception not to universal law about animals, but rather to a will to a hypothetical maxim of Wildness that relates also to validating and connecting with children. We weigh the balance of the ways Wild Kratts, and other educational and fantastical animated zoological adventures, such as BBC’s Octonauts, might seek to ignite and foster passion for applied biological sciences in small children at the cost of modeling ecologically transgressive behavior, such as landing a multistory steel turtle-shaped airship in the immediate neighborhood of endangered nesting grounds. And we break down Wild Kratt’s villainous and heroic uses of animals as a means, contrasting the bodily exploitation of Zachary Varmitech with the deconstructive appropriation of Aviva Corcovado.

And we ask ourselves, not why we think we ought to care about wild animals, but why we really do, and how that came to be, tipping our hatts to the Kratts in their capacity to inspire.

Also on the show, an aside on the taxonomical puzzle of Tunip the Vegimal, an animal/plant hybrid enjoined with the talking animals who wear pants, but not fully of them, in their continuing mission to explore, rescue, and protect the animals who also talk, but do not wear pants.

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Episode 893: You Come at the Elk, You Best Not Miss originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]