That's rather insulting to O'Reilly's artists. Do you really think that if they could not have copied those images they used on the first few books, they could not have mustered the skill to draw animals themselves?
I'm sure they could have. But would they? The story would have at least played out differently if that initial conversation had gone, "hey, let's pay someone to painstakingly draw animals and then transfer them to scratchboard" rather than "hey, look at these gorgeous woodcuts".
We now go to the original sources of the old engravings (we have a big library of old books full of them), and we also have a few illustrators who are able to work in that style. When we started out, we had no money for high-end illustrations; luckily the animal images I chose for the series were in the public domain. Fortuitous.
