"As a child, Adorno would often visit the Frankfurt zoo, accompanied by his mother Maria and the woman he affectionately referred to as his ‘second mother’, his aunt Agathe. Their excursions awoke in him a deep affection for the animal kingdom, a sense of wonder before ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ that was never to leave him. The young Teddie – his pet name, deriving from the teddy bear that came into popularity in the decade following his birth, itself designates a piece of tamed wildlife – took particular delight in squat, ungainly herbivores such as hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and even wombats. Apropos the latter, Adorno went to the trouble of writing to the director of the zoo after his return from exile to request they be reintroduced to the zoo’s holdings: ‘I can well remember … these round and friendly animals and would be happy if I could see them again…And finally, what about the dwarf hippopotamuses that they used to have in Berlin?’ In another letter, Adorno declared his support for the director’s campaign to have safari hunting outlawed, and offered to write a short, polemical essay on the topic: the curiosity of the child blossomed into the grown-up’s solidarity."