I don’t know if you went to the link and read the whole article, but it mentions that the Queen, and her sister Princess Margaret, were home-schooled and therefore did not have friends growing up. It was also WWII, and I think they were sent out of the country for a while too to save them from the blitz. Dogs and horses were the stable elements of their childhoods.
The Queen as a young girl had animals as her own playmates
I love this picture of her. Probably around 1938? Older?