Eliot Schrefer: Hi. I'm Eliot Schrefer, and I'm the author of The Animal Rescue Agency. Book One is called Case File: Little Claws, and the first character I came up with for this book wasn't Esquire the fox, but Mr. Pepper, her rooster assistant. A few years ago, I was on a road trip driving through rural Washington state, and we passed a farm and slowed down when we saw an old piece of plywood outside that had something painted on it. "Old hens for sale," it said. "$ 2." "Those poor, old hens," I thought. Then because road trips make you daydream, I started imagining an old hen indignant about that sign, outraged, clucking and clucking, saying she was worth way more than $2. And she'd been laying eggs for that farm for years, and how dare they sell her.

Years later, that hen became a rooster, Mr. Pepper, who was so outraged that a fox is trying to eat him that he convinced her to give up eating chickens entirely. They rescued each other in a way and settled down together. The fox and a rooster living in a den. Then they soon began rescuing other animals, and The Animal Rescue Agency was born.

The one thing that I wanted to explore in The Animal Rescue Agency was this idea of what we owe to animals, and, by looking at an unlikely pair of animals, a rooster and a fox who go and save animals in distress, it's a fun adventure, but it's also a way of thinking about what we owe the natural world and what the natural world can teach us.

The best thing about having a chicken as part of the pair with a fox is that foxes eat chickens, and so there's a great running joke between them around how delicious Mr. Pepper is. It's just kind of old-school ribbing between the characters, like she's not really going to eat her partner in business and in life, but still, they often joke about it.

And the rescue for book one is rescuing a polar bear, so the most famous predator in the natural world. So, the idea of Esquire bringing a chicken all the way up into the Arctic to go be in the same room as a polar bear is a big source of tension but also a bit of source of good-natured joking between them as well.

I'm going to read to you from the book about how they find out about their latest case that brings them heading off into the Arctic for a daring rescue:

Esquire's Animal Rescue Agency had a network of operatives around the world, and they were good at their jobs -- but she couldn't help an animal in distress until she'd heard about it! Since most creatures were too small to travel very far in one go, they relayed word, beast by beast and bird by bird, down the globe until it got to Esquire Fox.

The original artist's rendering might have been given to a hare, who relayed it to a puffin, who got it to an albatross, who flew it to the mainland and described it to a wolf, who ran it with her pack until they found an elk,who drew it in the dirt with his antlers so moles could sense the vibration of the picture and redraw it, then transmit it through their underground tunnels to the roaches in the local library, who logged in after hours to email their rendition to The Animal Rescue Agency, where a blinking alarm light notified Esquire of the incoming message. There was a lot of room for an artist's rendering to change over the course of all that. To be perfectly honest, roaches weren't good artists even in the best of circumstances.

Esquire leaned her narrow, foxy head close to the screen, so close that it tickled her whiskers. The stranded hippopotamus, or whatever this creature actually was, looked very worried. That fact, plus a rough location, was enough to get her started.