The article deals with the functions of animals in Dutch folk tales. The Dutch folk tales are almost not known among the readers and researches, which makes them a good material for analysis. In the article twenty five folk tales were analyzed, fifteen of them were published and eleven were found on the web-site of a folklore research institute in Amsterdam “Meertens institute”. The animals from the folk tales are regarded in this work as a zoo-metaphor, which corresponds with the theory of conceptual metaphor of G.Lakoff and M.Johnson. The idea of conceptual metaphor and the accepting of animals as metaphors let the author speak about the reflection of a perception of the world by the Dutch folk in the animal concepts. Three main functions of the animals were noted in the work: a hero, an instrument and a unit. A mention should be made about the fact that two of these functions can be represented at the same time: a hero and a unit. So that the function of a hero can be divided in two ones: “a hero-unit” and “a real hero”.