Farmer Duck, by Martin Waddell & Helen Oxenbury

This is one of the worst books I have ever read.  It is difficult to imagine how such a book like this could be written and conceived as an exploration of justice.  For anyone reading this who is a teen or an adult, this book will remind the reader of Animal Farm, for fairly obvious reasons (spoiler alert), but the book feels like an illustrated version of the first part of Animal Farm (before the inevitable Communist/socialist disaster) without a sense of self-awareness or irony.  That this book is aimed at children is easy enough to understand but also reprehensible, as most children aren’t going to understand why this book’s conceit fails to work and most won’t be savvy enough readers of Bastiat or other related authors to recognize the way that this particular book views resentment and envy as justice, which is all the more lamentable and problematic when it is aimed at children with the expectation that they will grow up to be resentful and envious socialists themselves.  I’m not sure how popular this book was, but it is sufficiently bad from a moral point of view that the writers of this book should have been punished for their attempts to corrupt and exploit children.

The plot of this book is laughable, but it must be admitted that the illustrations are on-point.  We have a lazy capitalist farmer who puts his hard-working duck (!) to work running the farm, and we see the duck getting increasingly upset to be doing so much work, and the other animals promise to help him out, which they do by scaring away the farmer and driving him away from the house so that the animals can set up their own communist republic, farming under their own self-rule.  Seriously, that is the plot of this story.  It is almost staggering that someone could feel that this is a good thing to publish for children, not least with a not that says that this book is about “fairness.”  Since when is farming fair to the animals?  The whole point of farming is for human beings to exploit the labor or produce of animals for survival and profit.  If a farmer had a duck who was intelligent enough to do the manual labor, you had better believe that a farmer would do so.  What is incomprehensible is how the farm expects to operate without a farmer.  Who is going to decide which chickens (or ducks) or cows are slaughtered, who is going to determine the milking schedule for the cows or the use of eggs for one’s larder and so on and so forth?  Do the writers (or the intended readers) have any idea how farms work?  Apparently not.

What are the reasons why this book is so offensive to me?  There is the obvious ripoff of Animal Farm while lacking the recognition of the failure of socialism and communism that this book at least offered.  There is the lack of self-awareness about the corruption of attempts at viewing farming through the eyes of “fairness” where the interests of ducks and other farm animals are viewed in hostility to the interests of the farmer, who owns all of the animals as property anyway.  There is, properly, no issue of fairness involved in this story at all.  The farmer has the absolute right to do what he wants, and if he wants to laze around in bed and has an animal smart enough to do the work, then the work is done.  How do the authors think we deal with computers or calculators or cell phones or tablets or anything else that furthers our interests and expands our power?  Is it fair to let computers or calculators do the work?  Should such thoughts even enter into our calculations?