Because animals are voiceless, we are free to put words into their mouths. Because they are innocent of human sins, we like to have them lined up on our side. I'll get back to the dangerous subject of innocence, after arguing that the best animal stories are written by those who find animals interesting for their own sakes.

As a reader, my favorite reason to read such a book is to enter into an animal's world and understand what its life might be like. Barbara Gowdy's "White Bone" is in part a book like this, and so are the Dr. Dolittle stories, and books with titles like "Flat-Tail the Beaver," "Cuffy: The Story of a Lynx" or "Macky: Portrait of a Young Shark on the Great Barrier Reef."

The White Bone Timbuktu King: A Street Story

I read a million of these as a kid. Many were written with the didactic impulse to explain the life cycles of the otter. Others were written with the didactic impulse to teach children how to behave, perhaps illustrating God's plan. They only pretended to be about animals. These books were inevitably unsatisfactory, since animals, despite their innocence, are always eating each other or having sex -- and never praying -- and so the nature lore must be bowdlerized to make a wholesome tale.

The Dr. Dolittle stories are fantasy, not nature lore. But the stories enter into (possible) animal points of view. It is important that the animals are animals, but the stories are the stories of interesting adults. They have strengths and weaknesses. They are characters with intention, not simply buffeted by fate. Nor do they exist to testify about humans.

Some animal stories are thinly disguised stories about people, and to hell with nature lore. "Animal Farm" is not about animals, and is not meant to appeal to those of us with a soft spot for whale watching, saving the black-footed ferret or paintings of dogs playing poker.

Among other motivations to write animal stories are two having to do specifically with animals as epitomes of the voiceless, the helpless and the innocent. Sometimes the author wishes to speak up for the innocent; that's one of Barbara Gowdy's aims with "The White Bone." And sometimes the author wishes to make the innocent speak up for the author and the author's friends, to act as character witnesses whose own characters are unimpeachable. That's what John Berger and Paul Auster are up to with their dog books.

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