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Children's spontaneous understandings of animals' needs were investigated to determine how they develop and how they contribute to values underlying environmental care. Children of ages 4 to 14 (n ϭ 171) were interviewed as they drew a favorite animal and what it needs. Certain types of understanding regarding physiological, ecological and conservation needs are described elsewhere (Myers et al., under review). In this article, we present qualitative and quantitative analyses of three additional ways that some children thought about animals' needs, which involved aesthetic, anthropomorphic, and psycho-social dimensions. The aesthetic orientation is shown by concern about animals' bodily coherence, and about the completeness and wholeness of its surroundings. The anthropomorphic framework, which characterized some less-experienced children, contains the important feature of awareness of the other's similarity to the self. This awareness attains more accurate and nuanced expression in the third conception, the psycho-social. Children typifying this latter view emphasized the subjective experience of the animal, and/or its need for companions. Both aesthetic and psycho-social conceptions were related to objective ecological needs. More importantly, all three conceptions are fundamental to the value components of biocentric environmental care. Curricula could help children of all ages be more aware of, articulate about, and able to balance these values. The perception of what animals need is a rich nexus for environmental education.

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Lewis R. Gordon is a well-known philosopher and social critic who has written extensively on a wide range of issues in race theory, Africana philosophy, film and literature, postcolonial phenomenology, and the philosophy of the human sciences. His work deals with issues that have an impact on the field of communication, yet his research has not been studied widely across the discipline. The purpose of this article is to outline a rhetoric of antiblack racism employing Gordon's work and apply it to an analysis of "postracial rhetoric."