If you asked me what my favorite animal was when I was a little kid, I would have said bear. No hesitation. I loved bears and even, up until I was three or four years old, believed I was one, calling myself “Baby Bear”. When I was a bit older, around ten years old, tigers were it. I thought they were beautiful and I loved the mythology of them being the only cat that liked water. There may have also been some decolonization of my imagination at play (bears were my favorite when I was living in California, tigers became my favorite when I moved to Jakarta).
At twelve years old, my family moved to Canada but beavers never became my favorite animal. Years later, however, moose would.
So, what’s my favorite animal now? It’s actually a little complicated. I answered this question for my students (when I was making videos for them during Covid) thus:
So, yeah, rhinos are up there. The fascination is recent, relatively speaking. I got most interested in them when I saw a The Dodo video about a baby rhino who befriended a kitten. That video made me realize that rhinos are much more like cows (in attitude) than they are the short-tempered, tank-bodied behemoths cartoons usually portray them as. They are interesting to look at and fun to draw.
You won’t be surprised, then, that I have a couple or rhino manuscripts. One of them is coming out in June of this year. How special! How specific! How singular! Right?
WRONG.
It turns out there are a LOT of rhino books coming out in 2025. Take a gander. We have Big Bike, Little Bike by Kellie DuBay Gillis and Jacob Souva.
Little Rhino Lost by Candy Gourlay and Jamie Bauza.
Never Take Your Rhino on a Plane by K.E. Lewis and Isabel Roxas
And, of course, Big Rhinoceros, Little Rhinoceros by me
Everything’s coming up rhinos! And I’m not sour that I’m sharing shelf space with these other books. The more rhinos, the better (a saying I would apply to Earth as well). I do find it surprising that rhinos are, apparently, 2025’s animal of choice. I remember hedgehogs being big, then octopuses, then sloths, then llamas. I don’t think I ever expected rhinos to make it there but I am thrilled that they have. It looks like my collection of books with “rhino” in their title is going to almost double in size!
