Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The writer Sam Anderson was up a ladder fixing something in his daughter’s bedroom when he heard a cracking sound. A hole had appeared in a floorboard underneath him the size of “a big burrito, a burrito stuffed with pure darkness”. Before he had a chance to mend it, his daughter’s pet hamster, Mango, escaped from his cage and disappeared into the hole. Days passed with no sign of the creature and so the family assumed he had died somewhere under their house. But then Walnut, their pet dachshund, began fixating on a spot in the living room wall. Anderson got out his tools and removed the skirting, and out staggered a dehydrated and dirty Mango. Walnut, says Anderson, had “performed a resurrection”.This story features in the opening episode of Animals, a new podcast from the New York Times. Each episode is built around a close encounter: there are bats, manatees, ferrets, puffins, dogs and the now-extinct Japanese wolf. Mango’s resurrection — the story of which has echoes of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Amores Perros, where a woman loses her dog under her apartment floorboards — is the trigger for a broader story from Anderson about his last dachshund, Moby, whose death hit him so hard he resolved never to have another dog. But then his wife brought home a puppy named Walnut, prompting him to reckon with his own mortality and that of his pets: “We will all eventually slip into that great cosmic hole in the floor,” he notes.Nature stories tend not to make sense in audio; there can be no gasping in wonder at kaleidoscopic underwater scenes or lions lounging in the savannah. But these aren’t your regular nature stories. They are about human interactions with animals, some of them happier than others. In Crystal River, Florida, Anderson fulfils a long-held dream of swimming with manatees, only to find the animals disturbingly crowded out by humans and their boats.In Vestmannaeyjar in Iceland, he hears about the puffin chicks — they are, delightfully, called pufflings — whose parents abandon them in their burrows when they are almost grown, leaving them to fly alone towards the sea. Many end up taking a wrong turn, mistaking street lights for the moon, and get marooned in local towns. And so Anderson — whose own daughter is preparing to leave the family burrow and go to college — joins locals in rescuing the disoriented pufflings, taking them to the nearest clifftop and physically flinging them towards the sea. Anderson is an engaging, heart-on-sleeve host, seeking out connections with animals and reflecting on his belief they are “basically magic . . . They enter worlds we never see, they sense things we can’t detect.” But within these sweet, meditative stories, he never loses sight of a darker truth: that no matter our love or fascination with other species, it is we who threaten their survival.nytimes.com
