So I've been interested in collage, and that made me want to look at art by Eric Carle, and recently I found a pocket sized version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar - in English - in the local public bookcase and took it home.
When I actually read it, I was surprised to find the caterpillar's pronoun was "he", because in the German version it gets female pronouns.
That's because the word for caterpillar, "Raupe", is grammatically female in German.
I'd be interested in a study looking at the gender balance in animal characters in childrens books, compared between different languages that feature grammatical gender aligning with human gender...