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\u2019s bedroom when he heard a cracking sound. A hole had appeared in a floorboard underneath him the size of \u201ca big burrito, a burrito stuffed with pure darkness\u201d. Before he had a chance to mend it, his daughter\u2019s 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 \u201cperformed a resurrection\u201d.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\u2019s resurrection \u2014 the story of which has echoes of Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s film Amores Perros, where a woman loses her dog under her apartment floorboards \u2014 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: \u201cWe will all eventually slip into that great cosmic hole in the floor,\u201d 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 they are, delightfully, called pufflings \u2014 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 \u2014 whose own daughter is preparing to leave the family burrow and go to college \u2014 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 \u201cbasically magic\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009They enter worlds we never see, they sense things we can\u2019t detect.\u201d 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s bedroom when he heard a cracking sound. A hole had appeared in a floorboard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-138851","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138852,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138851\/revisions\/138852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}