It is said that the author of the Doctor Dolittle series the Brittish-American author Hugh Lofting used to live animals and even had a small zoo in the laundry box... Later Lofting had to take part in World War I where he saw wounded horses in the battlefield and thought about establishing a horse hospital. But then, he thought, we would have to learn to speak horse language!
This idea is where it all started. In his letters to his children Lofting started telling a tale about an animal doctor Dolittle and everyone loved the stories immediately. So in 1922 Lofting published the first book of stories about Dolittle – in the end there were twelve. In traditional fairytales animals speak our language, but in the Dolittle stories everything is different.
