Stuffed animals have been around for more than a hundred years. Today I want to talk about stuffed animals, the history and some of the famous animals that are out there and maybe a little bit about collections.
Welcome to the Les Perras extensive English listening podcast episode 306. This episode is all about stuffed Animals. Stay tuned to the end of the lesson as we will have a list of all the major vocabulary that I used in this podcast. First Company As I said, stuffed animals have been around for more than a hundred years. The first company that claims to have made stuffed animals was the German Steiffe company. They made an elephant that was supposed to be a pin cushion. the mothers bought it to use as a pincushion but the children started playing with more than the mothers. It became popular as a children's toy. From there the company went on to make more and more animals and sell them as stuffed animals not as pin cushions. Stuffed Animals were Born And then stuffed animals were born. They were popular and they led to more and more stuffed animals. There was the teddy bear and then there was the Winnie the Pooh bear and the Paddington Bear. Then there were the Muppet style characters including Grover and Elmo which came from the Sesame Street television show. The list of popular characters that have been made into stuffed animals is too long to go into here but it also includes the ever-famous Snoopy and Mickey the mouse. Playing Games Kids have used stuffed toys for the past hundred and twenty years and one of the things they use the stuffed toys for is just playing games. They make the stuffed animals into characters and put them through dramatic or dangerous adventures, often crushing them and killing them because they're stuffed animals and they don't get hurt. Take To Bed But they also like to take the animals to bed with them at night. This really surprised me because I read recently that 1/3 of British adults still sleep with a stuffed animal at night. So obviously their childhood tendencies have carried on into adult life. People really like their stuffed animals. Because they like these stuffed animals so much they end up keeping them forever. Collections This starts to grow into a collection. Some of the collections have grown to huge sizes. Just go on the internet and type out a stuffed animal collection and search on an image search. You'll soon see many many images of giant stuffed animal collections. I'll bet you could probably see some animal collections on YouTube too if you did a search. Our society loves stuffed animals. it's something that's going to stick around for a while.
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