Featured Creatures: Animals in our lives

Award-winning author Lalita Gandbhir reflects on a lifetime with animals - from the dog she grew up with in India, who bit people for no reason, to the menagerie of creatures (from cats and dogs to a squirrel and a snake) that her animal-crazy husband and children brought into her household through the years. She also offers keen observations on animals she's encountered in the natural world, from elephants in Africa to eagles and moose in Alaska to the everyday creatures that have made their homes in and around her house and yard in Massachusetts. In thoughtful and sometimes amusing essays, she offers insight into a lifetime's worth of human-animal interactions, and how in some ways we humans and the animals we live among are not so different.