There’s an old children’s poem, “Who Killed Cock Robin“. (Click the link to read it.)

My, how times have changed, eh?

Would they even do a story like that for kids anymore?

No happy ending, for one.

The earliest known publication was in the mid-1700s, but the story may go back even further.

Stories for children way back when were more designed as cautionary tales rather than pleasant bedtime stories. Many of the stories we now call “nursery rhymes” originally had more violent, even gruesome, endings than the stories many of us are familiar with. For example, some older versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” have Red getting eaten by the wolf. One even has the wolf making Red an unwitting cannibal of her grandmother.

By comparison, “Who Killed Cock Robin” is rather tame.