I’m an animal person. I confess it. I love dogs and cats and birds. I’ve rescued a lot of wild animals.
How many birds do you think we had at one time?
Gee, well we had five aviaries and they were all rescued birds and I fed by hand eagles, owls, all the raptors.
Pelican.
Hummingbirds, every kind of bird you can imagine because I belong to a group, a rescue group for animals. And right now we have two goats and we have 21 chickens.
In Hawaii.
In Hawaii and some are fancy chickens, big plump chickens and little chickens and they all have so much character.
Of course we can’t forget the two pugs.
Oh, we had our two pugs.
Which were famous because, you know, they periodically appear in the books
Yes. We have to be careful what kind of animals are around us because they tend to whisper in my ear and create stories. We’ve also had two mastiffs. We had an English Mastiff. Those were my dogs, English Mastiff and Bull Mastiff and so I’m careful on naming them, careful on choosing them. Their colors have to look just nice in case we have to illustrate them. We never know.
Yeah, the animal motif is strong.