Favorite animal?

I am not sure why, but in the last month I have had four different kiddoes email me asking me what my favorite animal is. I love animals and of course favor my "pets", but of all the animals, the dolphin is my favorite for many reasons.

One of my favorite things to do is to scuba dive. I have seen many many underwater creatures; beautiful, strange and scary. The scariest was a four hundred pound potato grouper on a wreck off the Caymen Islands. The most graceful underwater and at the surface was the dolphin. When I was a kid I never missed Flipper, an old television show and always wanted to live on a boat and be a marine biologist, just not good enough at math and science. But the main reason was that I wanted to swim and befriend the dolphin!

I had one young lady write me back to tell me that your favorite animal says a lot about what kind of a person you are. A dolphin is the embodiment of freedom in the water. An intelligent creature whose understanding sometimes rivals the human species. A family was lost at sea after their yacht capsized near the coast of New Zealand. When the choppers finally found them (a spec in the sea) they were surrounded by numerous dolphins. The chopper pilot reported that below them were great white sharks and that the dolphins were diving and bumping them away from the human family. WOW! Flipper would be proud!

It's hard not to love a sea creature that cares the way I would hope my own species would. What is your favorite animal?