Brooke Barker - Sad Animal Facts

Red Squirrels live alone.

SAD ANIMAL FACTS

BROOKE BARKER

FLATIRON BOOKS

NEW YORK

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For Boaz, if you were a grasshopper
you could jump over a two-story building.

May you be a friend to every creature was my grandmothers creepy inscription in the Animal Babies book she gave me the day I was born.

I wanted her words to be prophetic, but my parents wouldnt let me have any pets and the nearest wilderness was annoyingly far away from our apartment complex in a Toronto suburb. So I settled for a childhood spent reading everything I could about animals.

What I learned wasnt always pretty. Just because our four-legged friends are soft and cute and often have amazing abilities doesnt mean they arent also incredibly sad. Everyone knows that pigs are pink and have curly tails, but did you know that they cant see the sky? Sea turtles are majestic, but did you know that they never meet their parents, or that octopi dont have friends, jellyfish have no hearts, and zebras cant fall asleep alone? Animals, it turns out, are just as complicated and conflicted as we are.

I couldnt stop reading about those sad little animals. I was obsessed. In third grade I had to leave a birthday party after a horrible run-in with a hive of honeybees. Every one of these stings is a bee that died, I informed my friends mom as she drove me home from the last party I got invited to that year.

A few summers ago, at the end of an uneventful seven-hour whale-watching cruise (we saw zero whales), our captain apologized to us for the hundredth time while we stared at a part of the ocean that looked like all the other parts of the ocean. I thought about how, if a whale sings at the wrong frequency, he cant find any other whales because they cant hear his off-key song. His whole life is a failed whale-watching trip.

The more I learned about animals, the harder it was for me to keep quiet about them. A few years ago I was a reference librarian. Its not as thrilling as it sounds. It was a pretty slow job in a quiet place, and I passed a lot of the time by drawing animals on the backs of old card catalog slips. Each of my coworkers would suggest an animal at the end of their shift, and Id draw it on the back of a catalog slip and leave it in the break room at the end of the day. Id try to go out of my way to add to the drawing some new piece of knowledge about the animal (king cobras can spit venom nine feet), and theyd try to go out of their way to request animals Id never heard of (monkfish, indri lemurs).

The more I read, the harder it is not to see these animals talking and complaining about their lives the way we do. The giraffe baby that falls six feet the moment its born must think, This is already off to a bad start, and worms with nine hearts must wish they only had someone to love.

There is a sad fact for every animal on earth, from fish and reptiles to cetaceans (marine mammals) and pinnipeds (a fancy word for seals and their cousins). There are animals that eat their own tails, that cant recognize their face in a mirror, and that force themselves to cry.

I hope this book doesnt force you to cry, and I hope it brings you closer to an animal in your life. Animals can use all the friends they can get. Sometimes they use them for food.