Unlike Reykjavik, some cities don't coddle citizens in their idiosyncratic beliefs about nature. We hear New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani react (with vehemence) to a man who believes New Yorkers should have the right to keep ferrets in their homes.
Paul Tough visits Catherine Chalmers. She raises small animals and insects in her apartment, feeds them to each other, and photographs them eating each other.
This American Life contributor Paul Tough visits Catherine Chalmers. She raises small animals and insects in her apartment, feeds them to each other, and photographs them eating each other.
Writer Brady Udall with another story about what animals can take the place of, in our lives and in our homes—this one involving an armadillo. This work of fiction originally appeared in the Autumn 1999 issue of Story magazine.
Lucy was a chimpanzee raised in captivity, who adopted a surprising number of human traits. But this proved problematic—in quite unexpected ways—when her adoptive human parents decided that Lucy should be released in the wild.
Anthropologists agree that humans stopped being animals when they started walking upright, on two legs. But scientists don't agree on why our ancestors did this.
When is a chicken your friend? When is he your dinner? TAL's former webmeister Elizabeth Meister talks with Kamiko Overs, an 11-year-old girl at the annual poultry exhibition run by the American Poultry Association in Columbus, Ohio.
When is a chicken your friend? When is he your dinner? This American Life's former webmeister Elizabeth Meister talks with Kamiko Overs, an 11-year-old girl at the annual poultry exhibition run by the American Poultry Association in Columbus, Ohio. Elizabeth Meister is a producer with Long Haul Productions.
A few times every summer, for complicated scientific reasons, thousands of live fish, crab and shrimp wash up onto the beaches of Mobile Bay, Alabama, on the Gulf Coast. It's a natural event—like a hurricane, but good.
Ralph and Sandra Fisher, who run a show-animal business in Texas, had a beloved Brahman bull named Chance. Chance was the gentlest bull they'd ever seen, more like a pet dog than a bull.