Ruth Padel on five books featuring wild animals The animal story became popular in the late 19th century with Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877), went wild with Kipling's anthropomorphic Jungle Books (1894-95) and grew up with the Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton's classic wolf story Lobo: King of the Currumpaw (1894). It was often written by naturalists who also wrote non-fiction. This had its own magic. In 1913, the Daily Express called The Life of the Spider, by the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (known then as "the poet of science"), "Far more fascinating than the lives of many princes." Fiction is a step further. RM Lockley wrote The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964) which inspired Watership Down (1972), but also a novella, The Cinnamon Bird (1948), whose hero is a freed canary. I grew up surrounded by both. Wild nature seemed the proper subject for all writing. The plots of my favourites - including poor old Lobo - upsettingly invoked intrusive humans. Hunters kill key characters in Bambi (1923, by the Austrian theatre critic Felix Salten) and Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter (1927). Humans domesticate the hero of Jack London's White Fang (1906). Marjorie Rawlings's The Yearling (1938) combines the taming and the killing. But you put up with this because great wild animal stories (like David Attenborough on screen) weave precise ecological observation, breath-holding narrative and authentic lyric wonder at the animal in its wild environment: the ideal marriage of empathy, imagination, poetry and science.