Whilst walking in the woods behind my home with my 3yr old grand daughter Lucy, we met a lady walking 2 huge dogs.
Lucy loves dogs and, though the animals were much bigger than her, she approached one of the dogs and started to stoke it's head.
I chatted to the lady then, suddenly, the dog who was not getting any attention from Lucy began to bark.
Being such a large beast the bark was very loud and it startled Lucy.
The owner of the dogs became quite cross with her pet for frightening this young girl and shouted at the dog to be quite.
Lucy was more upset by the woman shouting at her lovely dog than at the barking and so I tried to calm the situation by saying " Please don't shout at your dog - he was just trying to tell Lucy that he would like her to stroke his head too"
Lucy thought that this was fine and began to stroke both dogs equally,
When we continued our walk I was aware that something was bothering Lucy. She wasn't chattering away as she usually did. Quite out of the blue she turned to me as said " Grampy - Why don't animals talk like we do?"
She had obviously decided that if the silly dog had just asked for some fuss instead of barking the whole incident would have been avoided.
I thought - what a wonderful question for a 3yr old to ask - and I started to try to explain barks and meeows and quacks and roars. Soon I realised that I wasn't making much sense to Lucy.
She argued that if human babies begin by only being able to make noises but soon learn to talk surely if animals can make noises they should be able to learn to talk too - quite a reasonable argument if you think about it.
I decided that the only way out was to make up a story that would satisfy Lucy's curiosity and, that night, I sat down and wrote a story called "Why Animals Don't Talk".
That was the beginning of "The Why Series"
Now, many books and five years later here I am on Amazon as a published author.
You can find out all about me and my books at www.thewhyseries.co.uk - please do take a look and you can buy my books in printed form or as ebooks.
Funny how simple little incidents change the course of your life. My eternal thanks to Lucy ( now 8yrs old) for being so inquisitive and so intelligent.
