Animal Stories
Realistic Animals
Click on a grade below to see a list of suggested realistic animal stories for that level.
Talking Animals
Click on a grade below to see a list of suggested talking animal stories for that level.
Other Animal Bibliographies
New Animal Stories
Ages 4+
Sunny Acres Farm is a happy, beautiful, friendly place, until Grumpy Goat arrives. He is grumpy and unfriendly - none of the animals on the farm can even get close to him, let alone become friends! All Grumpy Goat wants to do is eat and eat and eat and eat and eat... and as he does so, he makes a huge mess on the farm - kicking down fences & being mean to the other animals. Then, he sees something special in the field, and everything changes. What does Grumpy Goat see?
A beautifully illustrated and wonderful story about the power of friendship - and stopping to smell the flowers.
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Ages 4+
After Violet packs her bags for vacation in sunny, beautiful, warm Florida, she prepares a bag for her dog, Pooch. He can't go on vacation to Florida with her -- no dogs allowed -- so he is going to Grandpa's farm to play in the snow. Nothing could possibly go wrong -- except that Violet accidentally takes Pooch's bag with her!
Worried that Pooch's vacation is ruined without his Fluffy Cat, his favorite red ball, and his food, Violet frantically calls Grandpa. Will everything be okay?
This would be a great read for a beginning reader looking for something a little bit more complex than books from our JP collection.
Grades 7 & Up
Sophie's mother runs a sanctuary for bonobo chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Africa. While visiting from America for a few weeks, Sophie rescues a bonobo from a man in the markets of Kinshasa. Otto, the badly abused bonobo, quickly bonds with Sophie, but she knows she must leave him soon to return to her father in the United States.
When the Congolese president is assassinated, and armed revolution breaks out across the entire country, Sophie's status as U.S. citizen means she can safely be extracted and returned to her home in the States... but it also means she must leave her Congolese friends at the sanctuary... and she must leave Otto.
Forced into a UN rescue van against her will, to be returned home, Sophie makes a daring decision and jumps from the van to return and care for Otto. A dangerous choice... especially when the sanctuary is attacked. Sophie and Otto miraculously escape into the gated bonobo enclosure while everyone else there is brutally murdered. Sophie and Otto must survive both the wilds of the jungle enclosure and the wild anger of revolutionaries trying to destroy the country.
Gripping and beautifully written, this powerful novel about survival in the face of many types of danger may redefine your definitions of human and animal.
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Find more books by Eliot Schrefer.
Like Endangered? Try these similar books:
Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel
Lost in the River of Grass by Ginny Rorby
Eva by Peter Dickinson
Reading Level: Grades 5 - 8
Truth can be much stranger than fiction and fiction based on truth can make a great story. Inspired by the life of Ivan Mishukov, Ivan Andreovich is a five-year-old boy who was orphaned in post-Soviet Russia, left on the streets to fend for himself, and adopted by a pack of wild dogs.
Life for street children is a battle to survive. Hunger, cold, roving gangs of both adults and older children make survival tenuous. Ivan finds his place with a family of dogs. Ivan and the dogs share what food they have and provide warmth and protection for each other. But more than that, the dogs love Ivan as he loves them. Ivan becomes more and more like his dog family. While humans can be uncaring or cruel, it is the dogs who show the most "humanity."
Ultimately, Ivan Andreovich , like the real Ivan, is rescued.
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Reading Level: Ages 4 - 8
A bear wanders into the city and becomes lost, so he enters an apartment and makes himself comfortable in this silly fractured fairytale with a surprise ending.

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