As Mr Fry so elegantly puts it: 'Animals are the oats in the QI muesli, the basic black frock in our wardrobe, the baseline to our phat phunky dub...'

John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, supported by a crack research squad of QI elves, are the authors of the bestselling The Book of General Ignorance.

Ted Dewan is one of the UK's best known children's authors and illustrators. His ground-breaking Inside the Whale & Other Animals won a Mother Goose Award in 1992.

Animals are the oats in the QI muesli, the basic black frock in our wardrobe, the baseline to our phat phunky dub. If you cannot be entranced, amused and astonished by the animal kingdom then QI has no use for you nor you, no doubt, for us.

Animals have this in common with each other: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves. A tree frog (so far as we can ascertain) doesn't wake up in the morning feeling guilty that it was a bad tree-frog the night before, nor does it spend any time wishing it were a wallaby or a crane-fly. It just gets on with the business of being a tree-frog, a job it does supremely well. We humans, well . . . we are never content, always guilty, and rarely that good at being what nature asked us to be - Home sapiens.

There is much to be learned from the animals. Much to be learned about them, of course, but much, much more to be learned about ourselves: our limits, our lonely uniqueness as a species and, I would add, our greatness. The fact that we care with unreciprocated fervour about woodlice, woodpeckers and wolverines is to our credit. I cannot subscribe to this modern idea that we should feel guilty about our role on earth, or inferior for having evolved a (self-) conscious mind. This is just Genesis wrapped up in new, even more sanctimonious clothes. The old religion and the new orthodoxy both claim we have guardianship over the earth and a `moral' responsibility for its destiny. Well, fine. But I will not apologise for committing the crime of being born any more than a marmot or a mosquito should. And between them, those two have been responsible for more death and upheaval than all human wars.

In the end, whatever weird and unfathomable purposes there might be to existence, to whichever theory of the development of life you might subscribe, we all have to face the fact that there is no entirely satisfactory explanation for the oddities and extremities of the zoological world. Nothing in nature seems to follow a fixed predictable law, not the number of penises on an insect, not the need for a chicken to have a head. I suppose they all have in common the melancholy fact that they have been impersonated with the use of nothing more than a mop of hair, expressive hands and a pair of big brown eyes, by Mr Alan Davies.