Colt Cain Photography

Artist Statement

Protecting Our Furry Friends is an educational children’s colouring book that teaches kids proper etiquette for interacting with wildlife and encourages them to explore and protect local conservation areas. The overall goal of this work was to use my photography to create an interactive resource for children aged 7-11 to learn ways they can contribute to wildlife conservation and hopefully help them cope with any eco-anxiety they may be experiencing.

Eco-anxiety is defined as a persistent fear of environmental destruction caused by direct experience with climate change or exposure to information about climate change through media. I, myself, experience eco-anxiety and after witnessing huge spikes of human activity at local conservation areas greatly impact the wildlife, I decided to contribute to combating environmental change and eco-anxiety by using my photography to educate others. 

This work builds off the research from my previous work, Wildlife Conservation in the Durham Region – which targets adults and advocates for proper practice when engaging with local wildlife. Since we tend to place the planet’s future in the hands of the youth, and it seems that many accessible children’s books about wildlife conservation present ways that professionals contribute, I chose to create a resource that might help kids feel like there is something they can do right now to save the environment.

Protecting Our Furry Friends pairs my wildlife photography with activities and hand-drawn colouring pages to create an engaging book that can be enjoyed by young readers, even if they aren’t within the targeted age group. 

About The Work

At the moment, Protecting Our Furry Friends is unpublished and simply a prototype of a book that I hope to publish someday. Only two copies have been made to date, one of which is on display at OCAD University for GradEx 109 May 1-5, 2024. The prototype copies are 11" x 8.5" handmade casebound books and their contents are printed on matte photo paper.

Free Colouring Pages

Want to try out some of the colouring pages? Download them free here!