When I was in kindergarten, I had a very old teacher who had some very old ideas about left-handedness. To her—and many others of her time—being left-handed was considered a disability. So anytime I pulled out a pencil, she’d yank it from my left hand and force it into my right.

In my teacher’s mind, she was trying to cure me. In my mother’s mind, she was preying on me. Marching straight to the principal’s office, my mom went on the attack to protect her southpaw daughter from a perceived predator. It’s not exactly a gazelle head butting a baboon to defend her fawn. But both human and animal moms come in all forms of amazing—even when the baddies are elderly