Literary creatures

As a life-long naturalist with three (now grown-up) kids, I greatly enjoyed Chae Strathie’s wise and witty article (Beasts and books, December 2019).

At the risk of sounding rather nerdy, I couldn’t help responding to the challenge he sets in his closing paragraph referring to choosing animals and titles for his own books: “And Gorilla Loves Vanilla? … you tell me another animal that rhymes with ‘vanilla’”. I can think of three immediately. The first is an Australian bird called the chowchilla that I had long wanted to see and eventually enjoyed watching seven years ago. The second is the zorilla, an attractively striped member of the weasel family from Africa. I also considered the palila, a Critically Endangered bird belonging to the Hawaiian honeycreeper family, though its name is pronounced ‘paleela’ rather than ‘palilla’.

Jonathan Elphick, Devon

I enjoyed Chae Strathie’s article about animals in children’s books – Charlotte’s Web still makes me cry. When he talked about some animals getting a bad rap in fiction, however, I feel it’s wrong to treat older tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs or Goldilocks in the same way as modern stories.

When these stories were written, there were bears in the woods, and though a wolf might not bother to dress up as Grandma, it might eat your pigs, and rats ate the food you’d stored up for the winter. No wonder they were seen as the bad guys.

Liz Turner, Chippenham