section_path: In culture
section_name: In culture
paragraph_text: In culture
  
  Since the 18th century, the farmer John Bull has represented English national identity, first in John Arbuthnot 's political satires, and soon afterwards in cartoons by James Gillray and others including John Tenniel. He likes food, beer, dogs, horses, and country sports; he is practical and down to earth, and anti-intellectual.
  
  Farm animals are widespread in books and songs for children; the reality of animal husbandry is often distorted, softened, or idealized, giving children an almost entirely fictitious account of farm life. The books often depict happy animals free to roam in attractive countryside, a picture completely at odds with the realities of the impersonal, mechanized activities involved in modern intensive farming.
  
  Pigs, for example, appear in several of Beatrix Potter 's "little books", as Piglet in A.A. Milne 's Winnie the Pooh stories, and somewhat more darkly (with a hint of animals going to slaughter) as Babe in Dick King-Smith 's The Sheep-Pig, and as Wilbur in E. B. White 's Charlotte's Web. Pigs tend to be "bearers of cheerfulness, good humour and innocence". Many of these books are completely anthropomorphic, dressing farm animals in clothes and having them walk on two legs, live in houses, and perform human activities. The children's song " Old MacDonald Had a Farm " describes a farmer named MacDonald and the various animals he keeps, celebrating the noises they each make.
  
  Many urban children experience animal husbandry for the first time at a petting farm; in Britain, some five million people a year visit a farm of some kind. This presents some risk of infection, especially if children handle animals and then fail to wash their hands; a strain of E. coli infected 93 people who had visited a British interactive farm in an outbreak in 2009. Historic farms such as those in the United States offer farmstays and "a carefully curated version of farming to those willing to pay for it", sometimes giving visitors a romanticised image of a pastoral idyll from an unspecified time in the pre-industrial past.