The question everyone asks
Put a lion next to a tiger and someone will say, "Who would win?" It is a good question to ask. It means you are curious about how strong, how fast and how big these animals are, and that is just what Peabody is for.
But "who would win" has a hidden problem: win what? A race is one thing. A staring contest is another. A fight is something else again, and nobody can say who would win that, because animals do not do it for fun.
What Peabody answers: a race
When you press the race button on two animals, they run (or swim, or fly) a short dash to a tree, each at its own top speed. The faster one gets there first. If they are very close, the card says "a photo finish!" Nobody gets hurt, nobody eats anybody, and everyone goes home happy.
A race is a fair question with an answer you can check, because a top speed is something a scientist measured and wrote down. The cheetah and the pronghorn make a good pair to try. The cheetah wins the short dash, but the pronghorn can keep going for much longer, and the result card tells you so.
What we leave out, and why
We leave out fights, animals getting hurt, and animals being eaten. There are three reasons. First, Peabody is for children, and a page you read by yourself should never give you a bad dream. Second, a fight has no single fair answer: it depends on how old each animal is, how hungry, how healthy and how big, and on where they meet. Third, it is not how animals usually live, and we would rather show you the real thing.
Some animals do eat other animals, and that is a true and important part of nature. Every page says plainly what each animal eats. We just do not turn it into a show.
Real animals mostly keep out of each other's way
In the wild, most animals spend their days finding food, resting, looking after their young and staying out of trouble. A fight can hurt even the winner, and a hurt animal has a hard time finding food. So animals have clever ways to avoid one: they walk away, they stand tall to look big, they make a loud noise, or they simply wait their turn at the water.
Many of the pairs we put side by side would never meet at all. Polar bears live in the far north and penguins live in the far south, so they could not meet if they tried. Animals also use different places and different times of day, so there is room for everyone.
For Big readers: why "who would win?" has no answer
Scientists do not study animals as if they were in a tournament. They ask how an animal lives: what it eats, where it goes, how it raises its young. A made-up match leaves out almost all of that, and the answer would change every time you changed the ground, the weather, or the animals' ages and moods. Top speed is different. It is one thing that can be measured, written down with its source, and compared.
That is also why a race result sometimes comes with a note. If one animal is swimming and the other is running, or one is only fast for a short dash, the card says so, so you can see what the race really shows and what it does not. Parents and teachers can read more on the page for grown-ups.
Pick Big at the top to see the part for older readers.