Jennifer Holland wrote the best-sellers “Unlikely Friendships” and “Unlikely Loves.” Along the way, she came across animal stories that went beyond those first two books.
“It’s fun to investigate these stories,” Holland said on the eve of a book tour to promote her latest, “Unlikely Heroes” (Workman). “I started to notice some of these as I was looking into others. I thought, it could be friendship, but there was more here. A heroic aspect that’d be fun to look into.”
“Unlikely Heroes” tells 37 stories of special animals — dogs, cats, a Quaker parrot, a llama, even an elk that rescued a marmot from drowning — that have gone above and beyond the ordinary. Some of the creatures are trained as therapy animals or in some other form of service, such as the camel who visits schools as part of anti-drug programs, or African pouch rats that are trained to detect landmines. But other animals do things that are kindly or compassionate, in short, heroic, such as an elephant seal named Gimpy that held off several other seals that were trying to attack her keeper. How and why these things happen are a mystery.
“Because I’ve been looking into this sort of thing a long time, I’m not necessarily shocked and amazed, but there is something that makes you scratch your head, especially when it’s not a dog or big mammal doing something a human would do,” Holland says. “When you see an elephant seal step in in a heroic manner, it’s a bizarre situation. I think for me investigating what we know about other animals, and about empathy and sympathy and animal intelligence is an important part of this. I’m happy to see people more comfortable now than they used to be assigning these things to animals.”
Holland has three dogs and “dozens of snakes and geckos,” but none of her animals has exhibited the here-I-come-to-save-the-day brand of heroism. Still, she feels very protected having her dogs nearby. “And maybe their effect on my mental health, having them present, has helped me through a lot of difficult times as well. So in a broad sense they’re my heroes.”
Jennifer Holland will talk about “Unlikely Heroes” at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Harold Washington Library Center’s Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 S. State St., in Chicago. Seating is first-come, first-served, with a maximum of 385. Additional guests will be seated in an overflow space and view the event by live simulcast. Books may be purchased, and Holland will do a signing after the program.
