Why do people write about animals? Books to read will be decided by the group. Allegories, satires, morality tales, children's literature, books which examine what it is that binds us to other animals, fantasy, nature writing, biography. For example: Flush, Virginia Woolf; Watership Down, Richard Adams; The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman; The Dog Crusoe, R.M.Ballantyne; The Birds, Aristophanes; The Goshawk, T.H White; Black Beauty, Anna Sewell; Animal Farm, George Orwell; Corvus: A Life with Birds, Esther Woolfson; The Wind in the Willows , Kenneth Graham; Moby Dick, Herman Melville. Or none of these.