Producers Nancy Updike and Robyn Semien report on critters that can kill sleep: cockroaches and bedbugs.

Producer Nancy Updike reveals to Ira the staff’s concern about his dog, Piney.

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.

Senior editor David Kestenbaum helps his kids set up an ant farm. They follow all the instructions, to the letter! But he ends up learning a lesson he’s pretty sure the manufacturer did not intend.

Ira with Clarence Hicks, who picks up dead animals for a living.

Julie Showalter, who grew up on a turkey farm, tells the story of the night 3,000 turkeys died.

Julie Showalter, who grew up on a turkey farm, tells the story of the night 3,000 turkeys died.

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.

Ira talks with Connie Rex about the deer she and her sisters kidnapped and ended up putting into their school’s Christmas pageant in Woodruff, Utah, in a starring role.

Host Ira Glass point out that it's not enough this time of year that we eat millions of turkeys. Someone also went to the trouble to make up a song about turkeys getting the supernatural power to play baseball.

After hearing about the heist, Kirk Wallace Johnson gets sucked into the feather underground. He ends up discovering things that the people in charge of the theft investigation didn’t.

How fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews are combining forces to breed a perfect red cow that could bring about the end of the world. Ira talks with cattleman and minister Clyde Lott, and with New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright.

What divorce looks like from the dog's point of view. (5 minutes)This monologue was performed by Merrill Markoe and recorded at Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles.

Ben Loory reads his short story about an unlikely friendship that forms between a moose and a man. It's from his fiction collection Stories for the Nighttime and Some for the Day.

Even when an animal is not a pest, not chewing up homes or spreading disease or biting average citizens, even when it is universally loved, it can still wreak havoc when it arrives in our world. James Spring has this example from a community of harbor seals in La Jolla, California, near San Diego.

A friend tells Jonathan Goldstein how a trip with a pot-bellied pig ended up revealing his character and making his girlfriend leave. Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the radio show Wiretap on the CBC, where a version of this story originally aired.

Nature photographer David Slater went to Indonesia. While he was there, he got some stunning photos of monkeys.

Yet another testimony to the power chickens have over our hearts and minds.  Jack Hitt reports on an opera about Chicken Little.  It's performed with dressed-up styrofoam balls, it's sung in Italian and, no kidding, able to make grown men cry. (14 minutes)The official website for the opera "Love's Fowl" by Susan Vitucci and Henry Krieger is pulcina.org.

Back in the day, generally when a wild animal showed up, we’d just kill it. Take this press release the federal government put out nearly a hundred years ago.

Yet another testimony to the power chickens have over our hearts and minds. Contributing editor Jack Hitt reports on an opera about Chicken Little.

The true story of how a multinational chicken company turned a white man into a black man. The man they did it to? An old time Kentucky Colonel who liked to dress up as a Southern plantation owner in string tie and goatee, who happened to be their own spokesman.

What do cats want to see on television? Steve Malarky, creator of the world's best-selling home video for cats, tells all. And—in the interest of equal time—a cashier who works at a chain store that sells pet products rants about the absurdity of the items she's ringing up every day: St.

Greg Warner was living in Pakistan, on the border of Afghanistan, when he met a man—a tough guy, former smuggler—who wanted to break his friend out of prison. He'd bought an expensive amulet, to keep his friend safe during the breakout.

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.