Great question. As an O'Reilly author myself, I can tell you that we have no control over the animal selected. There's a fun animal selection process, but the publisher's decide.
Disclaimer - I work for Google and worked on this book.
Disclaimer - I work for Google and worked on this book.
You can check out the whole O'Reilly menagerie at https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp.
(disclaimer: I worked on the book)