Rabbits, foxes, owls, snails: animal memoirs are becoming wild

For most of her life, Katherine Raven felt unworthy. She then became friends with the fox.

After growing up in an abusive home she felt unwanted, Raven moved at the age of 15 and never felt comfortable around others. In 2003, she lived in a remote valley cottage in Montana and worked as a field guide when the fox appeared one afternoon.

He came back every day. Sometimes he would bring her dead mouse as a present. Sometimes they played a chicken game and he would approach her until she retreated. He listened when she read him. If Raven wasn't outside, the fox would peer into her window looking for her.

One night he brought the kit to her pouch and fell asleep, causing her to babysit some wild young foxes. The show of trust has changed Raven's life.

“It was a turning point in how I felt about myself,” Raven told me on a phone call from his home in southwestern Montana. “I felt like, wow, I was someone I trust.”

Raven tells the story of the relationship between 2021 memoir, “Fox and Me.” An instant bestseller, this book belongs to the vibrant subgenre of autobiography. This is a memoir about the incredible bond between humans and wildlife.

The author's book about dogs and cats has long been a literary staple, with popular critical hits about John Grogan's unruly labrador “Marley and I,” and Caleb Carr's love letter to his cat, “My Beloved Monster,” in recent years, the category of pet memoirs has expanded to include other domesticated species with an astonishing number of autobiography, including chickens, goats, pigs, alpacas, donkeys, and more.

As a lifelong animal lover, I recently became obsessed with a popular, growing subset of animal memoirs. That's the story that explores the meaning of connecting with untouched creatures, and why such relationships are so refreshing and transformative.

Unlike those that wipe out natural stories about species, ecosystems, or parts of a planet, these memoirs focus on individual animals and portray them as fully formed characters with complex personalities and unique quirks. Animals are usually the main characters, while humans work as storytellers. In many cases, animals arrive unexpectedly in the life of writers, leading them to the path of self-discovery.

In “Raising Haa,” a new addition to Canon, Chloe Dalton details how her life took an unexpected turn after a chance encounter with a baby rabbit led to a profound and lasting relationship. Other recent genre classics include “H is for Hawk,” a moving story about Helen MacDonald dealing with grief by training Goshoks named “Alfie and I.”

An older but widely loved memoir, and a rare example of starring molluscs, is Elizabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of Eating a Wild Snail. This tells how she became comfortable with the presence of the snail that occupied the plants on her night stand while she was obsessed with her debilitating illness.

The nature of the relationship is different, but some animals become writer's housemates, while others really remain wild – these memoirs share a common thread. Often, the authors are dealing with grief, trauma, or loss, finding comfort in the animal company that is not forced to be their companions, and do not pity or judge them. Many authors describe how they form connections with other creatures and how things that were not borne by ownership changed their understanding of themselves and humanity, expanding their abilities to compassion and empathy.

“One of living with animals is that I can see the world through other eyes. It's made the world bigger for me,” said McDonald, whose “H IS FOR HAK” sells more than 500,000 copies in the US. “There is human hunger for intimate contact that is much more intimate with animals.”

As someone who grew up with pet-rich pet-rich pets thanks to his luxurious, animal-loving father, I am fascinated by the non-human protagonists of these memoirs.

Our zoo included regular dogs, cats, rabbits, bodges, canary, finches, guinea pigs and hamsters, but also a spinning cast of turtles, frogs, crayfish, and rescued pigeons and sparrows. For a while we kept a baby parrot, realising that our father was struggling on the ground. The tiny, featherless bird blossomed into a large, squatting, fruit-pulp peak diva named Sally, who frequently tainted our kitchen, and some of us were relieved when she flew one day. (Our mother drew rodents – slow rodents, whose father, whom he kept in a huge sand-filled aquarium in his bedroom, was jumping with oversized ears and long spinning legs.)

Still, whether there were enough animals at home or enough animals to fill the petting zoo, I wanted to be near Wild. I occasionally snorkel around the reef (a pilot fish I named Herman continued me to the coast), or during a family excursion into the desert, a host of fascinating creatures, where dung, locusts, geckos, camel spiders, and rich yaboa. But more often I had to settle for second-hand experiences through books such as “White Fang” and “Blue Dolphin Island.”

A recent collection of memoirs on wild creatures has given me a window into the daily lives, behaviors and personalities of animals that most of us are unlikely to encounter at close range. Wild places on Earth have been reduced. Most of us are separated from nature and its inhabitants.

Our collective longing to connect with animals is evident in the popularity of animal celebrity viruses on social media. He has also been filmed in films such as the documentary “My Octopus Teacher” and the feature film “The Penguin Lessons.” This was adapted from Tom Michel's memoir about rescue an oil-filled penguin found on a beach in Uruguay.

“What our species have is a very old yearning,” said Sy Montgomery, a naturalist who wrote dozens of books on animals, including “How to Become a Good Creature.”

As children, most of us feel an instinctive connection with other creatures. And some of the oldest forms of human art and literature – cave paintings, myths, f-tales – the heart of animals.

“It helped us survive,” Montgomery said of the connection. “Until 10 minutes ago, we were all a gathering of hunters. If you didn't pay attention to nature, Smilodon would come and eat you.”

Dalton explains how her rhythm and sense of self have changed in her recently released bestseller, Raising Hare.

Before Levalet entered her life, Dalton's presence revolved around her work. The international political consultant traveled the globe and ran adrenaline in response to the geopolitical crisis. During the pandemic, Dalton retreated to her home in the British countryside. There, one afternoon, he walked down the field and spotted a little rabbit chased by a dog. Dalton took Levalet home, gave it to a bottle, and eventually gave her a run in her home and garden, imagining that she would one day return to the wild.

Upon maturation, the rabbits began to go outside the garden walls and disappear, sometimes to grow for weeks. But to Dalton's surprise she always came back and patiently waited by the door.

Her quiet presence had a major impact on Dalton.

“Her actions made me stand still, calm me down and made me feel differently about my life,” Dalton said in an interview.

It takes risks to portray wild creatures as human companions. Biologists and naturalists may think animals want to be our cute companions in some stories about the safety of animals and humans, dialogue with wildlife, and friendship between humans and animals.

Another criticism of some animal memoirs is that the author is lost in personification and assigns human characteristics to human non-human subjects. But writers who spent time with other species say it's stupid to assume we're very different.

“For a long time, it's been anthropomorphism and it was a trend to say that it was the stupidest thing I've ever heard,” Montgomery said. “It means that emotions, personality and personality are all human characteristics.”

Part of the narrative tension in memoirs about wildlife comes from how tenuous and fleeting the relationship feels. In “H is For Hawk,” McDonald is always worried that when Mabel flies freely and hunts, she may never return. Dalton passes the walls of his garden and feels pain when the cigarettes cross the boundary. “It might be the last time she leaves it,” Dalton told me.

Poet and artist Frida Hughes, the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, always knew that her relationship with the Magpie would end, but she didn't expect how sharply she would feel.

Hughes finds George in her Wales home garden after a storm blows his nest. She didn't expect the little bird to survive. Instead, he flourished and grew into a wi-no-mystery, an evolution detailed in his 2023 book, George: The Magpie Memoirs.

George stole the peas from Hughes' plates and stuffed them in his back pocket. He grabbed her pencil and ran away, chasing him around the garden. Once he could fly, Hughes left the kitchen window open so that George could go back and forth. She later found out when she visited a local pub that he was flying around to meet her neighbor.

“Everyone knew George,” she said. “George lived more social life than I did.”

Hughes sorted her life around the birds. Every night at dusk she blew a hist for him and he slammed a barrel out of the window. One night she blew a hist, George didn't go home, and she knew that the era of magic was over.

“At one point, I knew that the happy ending was for him to leave,” said Hughes, who took over the injured and unnecessary birds after George left. “When he did it, I was really escaped.”

More than three years later, Katherine Raven's relationship with Fox suddenly ended when she devastated the area around her Montana home. She never saw a fox again. But her impact on her life has only grown up for years since, she said.

When “Fox and I” was released, Raven found himself interacting with more people and, to his surprise, enjoying it. It was Fox, as she taught her how to connect with others, Raven said.

“Fox gave me self-esteem,” she said. “I'm like Fox right now.”