A conversation with Brooke Barker, author of Sad Animal Facts
By: Summer Johnson
Brooke Barker, age 33, has created a collection of cartoons through her book, Sad Animal Facts, highlighting that it is not just humans who feel sad or get down in the dumps. Her New York Times bestseller book showcases how all kinds of animals get sad in their own way.
Brooke Barker’s work has new relevance as coronavirus-related melancholy emerges during these challenging times. It provides readers with a humorous outlet embedded with scientific facts.
Brooke and I are family friends from Plymouth, Minnesota. We spoke via video chat in July with minimal technical difficulties. Brooke was in Pittsburgh, where she currently resides, and I was in Martha’s Vineyard. We discussed her journey of becoming an author and the driving force behind Sad Animal Facts. Here is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
Did you always want to be a writer?
I guess I came into it accidentally. I was an advertising copywriter in Portland, Oregon, coming up with campaign ideas for Coca-Cola and other clients. I mainly wrote commercials but also tweets and sometimes websites. Every day I had to come up with hundreds of ideas.
One day, I had gone down a rabbit hole and found this fact that worms had five hearts. I tried to work it into a voice-over for a commercial. When I presented it, my colleagues found it way too weird, saying it did not relate to the product, which was tough to hear but fair. I ended up collecting these random animal facts until an artist held the Hundred Day Project challenge on Instagram, asking people to do one thing for a hundred days and then post about it. I started an Instagram account and tried to make a new comic every day centered around an animal fact. I eventually got approached by a publisher which led me to write the book, Sad Animal Facts.
Who knew a worm comic and an Instagram challenge could lead to you becoming a New York Times bestseller?! Could you share a bit more on the process of turning that worm comic into Sad Animal Facts?
I have always been a little nerdy and liked animal facts. I liked the worm comic because it included subjects that are important to me, like science and empathy.
Animals live differently from each other and humans, but no one ever talks about the sad parts of their lives. Everyone knows that cats are agile, but no one talks about how cats cannot recognize each other. And they know that eagles have a crazy long wingspan, but not that their nests can be so heavy they fall from the tree branches. I wanted to create a comic about cute animals and bring to light the sad aspects of their life. This led to the medium I created which includes my illustration of the animal, a related fact, and a thought bubble or one-liner that adds humor.
You mentioned the intersection of science and empathy. What is your goal in writing these comics? What do you hope your readers get from them?
I hope, and this may be a big reach for Sad Animal Facts, people can see there is another way to live life. A lot of times people in society feel they should be acting a certain way.
For example, when you are about to be 30, there is a lot of pressure to settle down or to start thinking about a family. When female animals, like Numbats and Binturongs, conceive during a time of distress, they can delay their pregnancy to give birth at a more optimal time. The right timing to start a family will be different for everyone. There should not be “rules” on how people choose to live their lives.
Some animals eat their skin, others grow food on their arms. By looking at nature, you see there are a million different ways to exist and it is inspiring to learn from their differences. It gives me hope that people and communities can learn to live in different ways too.
Hold up, wait, which animals eat their skin, and grow food on their arms?! *Brooke laughs*
Frogs eat their skin when they shed it off; they like the saltiness. Yeti crabs, one of my newest obsessions, live in oceans near geothermal vents. They have bacteria growing on their pinchers, which they wave over the vents until the bacteria is fermented enough to eat.
I would say I know an abnormal amount of animal facts, but I did not know either of these. So fascinating! How do you even go about finding these facts?
I read a lot of science journals. And during this pandemic, scientists have a lot more free time. Many have been conducting online broadcasts and speaking about animals. A recent one I listened to was about puffins. There is no shortage of animal facts.
However, since I am focused on sad animal facts, I usually have to reverse the headlines. Recently, there was a headline on how a dog learned to ice skate. If I flip it, I could use the fact that most dogs do not know how to ice skate. It can be a depressing way to look at the data.
Another aspect of my research is verifying the facts. Journalists put their own slant on things that you must watch out for. A recent headline said something along the lines of male birds being able to guess their female partner’s food cravings. After I started studying this fact, I discovered that this was not clear from the study. Female birds could have easily been communicating with non-verbal cues on what they wanted to eat, instead of the male birds just guessing accurately. Writers put a male heteronormative spin on the language for many of the animal facts I come across. Like this seal clapping fact, someone wrote how male seals clap so strongly, but all seals, male or female, clap with the same strength. Why do they feel the need to only mention the males? It is important to strip back the information to the actual facts.
How do you do that? How do you sift through the information?
It can be difficult since there are many fake animal facts out there. For example, during the Australian bushfires that started in late 2019, people sent me write-ups about wombats herding other animals into their burrows for safety from the smoke. While the story is cute, that did not exactly happen. Another one I hear often is how bird parents will abandon their children if the babies or nest smells like humans, but there is no proof of this.
To verify, I usually look for the citation to the original publication or scientific journal. Many times, the original source contains a better or more interesting fact than what was published in the newspaper. Unfortunately, it is easy for “fake facts” to get circulated. An incorrect fact gets published once and then picked up by many other sources.
I heard that bird “fact” growing up, I had no idea it was fake. When I read your facts, I know they are sad, but I find a sense of irony as they can bring me joy and happiness. Have you heard this from other readers or is it just me?
It is intriguing because you internally feel for the sad animal in a cute way. There tends to be a lot of love for characters like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Everyone wants to cheer for the sad character, the one doing a little worse than the others.
What are your next steps for Sad Animal Facts? Are you compiling another book?
I want to pitch a new book on how scientists study animals. I have realized the study itself can be more interesting than the fact discovered. For example, a study was conducted on goats and which facial expressions they preferred. The scientists would put large posters of people with different facial expressions in the goat corral to see their reaction. To me, that is more interesting than the mere fact that goats prefer happy expressions. I would like to do profiles on scientists and their studies, especially on ones who look different from the typical scientists we are used to seeing, like profiling black and minority scientists.
How are you using your platform to highlight or speak to the current environment?
This is a question I have been pondering a lot since the start of COVID-19. I do not want to share facts about animals getting sick. At first, I did not even want to post so I started re-posting old content, hoping it would give people something to look at. As for the Black Lives Matter movement, I have only been sharing what other people have posted. I am hoping in the next few weeks I can think of a comic to help raise awareness on systemic racism.
Sad Animal Facts is fun, but I think the medium I invented, can only do so much. Sometimes there are animal facts that I cannot publish because they are too sad. One that got a lot of pushback was on monkey funerals. How can I make a joke about that? It is just sad. Shifting my medium may allow me to more easily post about serious issues like COVID and Black Lives Matter movement. I just do not know if sad animal facts are the best way to call attention to these issues.
Thank you for the time, Brooke. It was great to hear about your journey and all the research you have conducted. Everyone should check out Sad Animal Facts on social media and keep a lookout for products and books by Brooke Barker.