Being a good friend takes practice and effort. Loyalty, patience, and selflessness are key parts of friendship, and hard to put into practice when trying to recruit many friends instead of just a few. Aesop's fable "The Hare with Many Friends" drives this point home to readers! They'll take away similar lessons from the many other stories of Aesop, including "The Lion, the Fox, and the Stag" and "The Swan and the Goose." All enhanced by hand-drawn illustrations, these fables help readers begin to understand strong character and the good it can bring to self and others.

Being a good friend takes practice and effort. Loyalty, patience, and selflessness are key parts of friendship, and hard to put into practice when trying to recruit many friends instead of just a few. Aesop’s fable “The Hare with Many Friends” drives this point home to readers! They’ll take away similar lessons from the many other stories of Aesop, including “The Lion, the Fox, and the Stag” and “The Swan and the Goose.” All enhanced by hand-drawn illustrations, these fables help readers begin to understand strong character and the good it can bring to self and others.

The text is young and simple, and clearly portrays helpful morals through fun characters that young readers can relate to. All of the classic, best-loved fables have been included, as well as some lesser-known stories that have been retold to intrigue and entertain children for the very first time.

A collection of animal fables told by the Greek slave Aesop.

Wolf is afraid of his own shadow. One day, by a stroke of luck, his fear turns out to be very useful.

Turns a critical eye on Aesop's Fables to ask whether there is any scientific truth to Aesop's portrayal of his animals. Despite originating more than two-and-a-half thousand years ago, Aesop's Fables are still passed on from parent to child, and are embedded in our collective consciousness. The morals we have learned from these tales continue to inform our judgements, but have the stories also informed how we regard their animal protagonists? If so, is there any truth behind the stereotypes? Are wolves deceptive villains? Are crows insightful geniuses? And could a tortoise really beat a hare in a race? In Aesop's Animals, zoologist Jo Wimpenny turns a critical eye to the fables to discover whether there is any scientific truth to Aesop's portrayal of the animal kingdom. She brings the tales into the twenty-first century, introducing the latest findings on some of the most fascinating branches of ethological research – the study of why animals do the things they do. In each chapter she interrogates a classic fable and a different topic – future planning, tool use, self-recognition, cooperation and deception – concluding with a verdict on the veracity of each fable's portrayal from a scientific perspective. By sifting fact from fiction in one of the most beloved texts of our culture, Aesop's Animals explores and challenges our preconceived notions about animals, the way they behave, and the roles we both play in our shared world.