When I was growing up, I naturally felt attracted to other animals. I didn’t have a lot of other children in my life growing up. But that was fine, because I had lots of other friends. They just happened to be squirrels and crickets. And I had an Anolis lizard, I had a wonderful Scottish terrier named Molly, who was the equivalent, I guess, of a sister. I was an only child.
I always felt that here were these creatures around me who knew secrets that I didn’t, and I could tell, my Scottish terrier could hear things that I couldn’t hear. She could smell things that I wasn’t experiencing. So by having friends who were members of other species, I kind of hooked into this wider world.
And at that time I didn’t know, for example, that crickets’ ears are on their knees, you know. I didn’t know that spiders can taste with their feet. But I did know they had something to teach me. That they were the teacher. I was the student. And I think this is what kind of pre-adapted me to go forth and write books on these subjects, with that kind of excitement and deep respect for the teachers that were all around me.
And it actually was many years later that I learned how much fun kids were, from our 750-pound pig, Christopher Hogwood. He was the subject of a book that I wrote called The Good, Good Pig, and he was kind of the center of our life there, in Hancock, New Hampshire, where I live with my husband, and right now, a small flock of hens, and a border collie named Sally. But when Christopher was there, we also had a number of other animals, and he instantly attracted around him this great family of other people’s children, and visiting aunts and uncles, and the neighbors, he was like this great magnet. People would bring their garbage, basically. We’d invite them over for dinner and a show. They’d bring Christopher Hogwood dinner, and the show was watching him eat it.
I write everything I can, because you never know what’s going to work. I write about conservation. I write about animals and people, and how we can live together on this earth, and this is why I write for adults, I write for kids, I sometimes write for television. I write for radio. And all my books, all my articles, all my commentaries are all the same love letter repeated over and over.
I’m trying to reconnect us with the rest of our family. They may not look like us, they may have more legs than us, or fewer, in the case of snakes and worms. But all of my books, written for kids or adults, and all my articles, they’re saying the same thing. It’s trying to reestablish this connection that humans I think naturally have with the rest of animate creation.
But when we start to lose that, that’s when we get the mess we’re in, with pollution, and deforestation, and overpopulation, and global climate change. I think it’s particularly important, though, to write for children now, and I’m concentrating increasingly on doing that.
