Listen, tamanduas are just like you, or Carrie Bradshaw, or the French. When they want to unwind, they go for a glass of red wine. And we all know where that leads:

Now, don’t yell at me, because I checked and if it’s the same anteater as the one below (and realistically, how many anteaters drinking out of wine glasses in private homes ARE there), he’s just drinking cranberry juice.

So, probably more like this:

After 80 to 100 years of life presumably full of whatever passes for adventure to a giant insect, Larry the lobster hit rock bottom and wound up in the live-lobster case at the Dock restaurant in Waterford, Conn. It’s so tragic when our elders lack social support. Fortunately, Larry got spotted by boat company VP Don MacKenzie, who appointed himself the big guy’s benefactor. MacKenzie reserved the 17-pound Larry for dinner, then spent an undisclosed amount to release him uneaten into the Long Island Sound.

MacKenzie is being coy about how much he spent for the giant crustacean, whose age he estimates as being at least 80 based on Larry’s size and how often he’s molted. He’s disclosed only that Larry was “the most expensive lobster I never ate.” But live lobsters at the Dock’s fish market cost $9.99 per pound for a 1.25-pounder, $10.99 per pound for 1.5 pounds, and $11.99 per pound for 2-pound lobsters. By those numbers, a 17-pound lobster would cost at least $200, and possibly much, much more.

Larry probably would have been too tough to eat, although MacKenzie released him out of respect rather than gustatory choice. “This lobster has seen World War I, World War II, seen the landing on the moon and the Red Sox win the World Series. He’s made it this far in life,” he said, according to ABC News. “He deserves to live.” We’d be willing to bet the cost of Larry’s freedom that he did not have access to a TV in 1969, but whatever, the point is that nobody wants to eat an old lobster, because it’s depressing and tastes bad.

Here is high-quality video of MacKenzie and Larry’s life together from now on:

Okay, not really; Larry has actually been dropped in a top-secret location in the Sound, where he will supposedly be safe from fishermen. He had a big sendoff, including chanting from the children who used to visit him at the Dock. MacKenzie himself kept no memento of Larry but the rubber bands from his claws. Sniff.

This rescued baby walrus is no more than six weeks old and already 200 pounds, so chances are good that you don’t have room for him in your apartment. But I defy you to watch this video and not want to fly out to the Alaska SeaLife Center and demand adoption papers. He’s so big and snuggly! It would be like having a pet waterbed.

The basic rule about baby bears is Do Not Go Near Them. Ever. But what do you do if they’re stuck in a garbage can, crying all night, with the mom stalking nearby? If you are this group of brave people, you rescue them:

You kind of have to wonder how the bears got up into the dumpster to begin with, considering they needed a ladder to get out. Maybe Mom put them in so she could go catch fish with her friends.

The average American lawn is one-fifth of an acre, or 8,712 square feet. That’s a lot of passes with your push reel mower. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just hire some goats, cows, or guinea pigs to take care of it for you? Movoto.com, a real estate company, is helping you plan your livestock yard care by calculating how many animals of different sorts it would take to mow your lawn in one day.

Let’s find out what it would take to mow the average American lawn, shall we?

First, decide what animals you’d like.

I choose chickens! Because then you can eat their eggs, as well. Now, how big’s your lawn? I don’t actually have one, so I’ll let my imaginary chickens loose on the average American lawn.

How many chickens will I need??

Holy balls, 232 is a lot of chickens. And probably way more eggs than I can eat. But at least I get the fertilizer from their poop?

If you don’t want 232 birds worth of chicken droppings, though, you could also go with: one cow, seven goats, 15 sheep, or 348 guinea pigs. Now you know.

E.T., a 30-year-old walrus at Tacoma’s Point Defiance Zoo, is clearly in training to replace Wilford Brimley. He has the looks down, and he’s working on his acting; he can already do eight different types of vocalization on command.

The sight of a walrus puckering up to whistle is probably the most startling part, but that last sound (the command is “bell”) gets more impressive every time I listen to it. It’s like the Tuvan throat singing of walrus noises.

Hey! Are you a jackass? Then you could probably use this advice: As much goodwill and admiration as you may think you’re earning by knowing everything about everything, I guarantee you it will not make up for what you lose when you tell a 10-year-old to pet a rabid bat.

Last week a bunch of kids in Spencer, Mass., crowded around to look at a bat that had fallen from a tree, like you do. They didn’t want to touch it, until a so-called adult picked the bat up and encouraged the assembled kids to hold or stroke it. The rabid animal was, she assured them on the basis of no knowledge whatsoever, “the friendliest thing ever.”

Of course, the bat didn’t bite her. Oh no. Instead, it bit 10-year-old Jojo Keefe, who notably was NOT slinging a lot of BS fauxspertise about wildlife. Bats have no sense of justice. Jojo now has to spend her summer getting rabies shots, and the batsplainer has slunk away into the shadows, from which she will not emerge until someone has a question about Wikileaks or Mountain Lion or the economy.

Moral: Don’t pet wild animals, you guys, and if you have to be an uninformed blowhard about something, go do it on Ron Paul forums where children can’t hear you.

Sysco — the giant, often-invisible food distributor — offers 400,000 products to the bulk of the nation’s restaurants and other institutions. It has a 17.5 percent market share, made $37 billion in sales in 2010 alone, and dispatches a cavalcade of silver trucks daily from 180 locations across the U. S.

In other words, Sysco is wholesale food in America, the same way Cargill is farming and Walmart is, well, all of retail. Or, as Salon put it back in 2009, Sysco has “come to monopolize most of what you eat.” So when the company changes a policy — like it announced it was doing on Monday, when it pledged to do away with meat from pigs raised in gestation crates — there is bound to be a striking ripple effect.

In a statement to the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS), the company wrote: “Sysco is committed to working with its suppliers to create a gestation crate-free supply system, for the good of all. Like many of our customers, we’re going to work with our pork suppliers to develop a timeline to achieve this goal.”

As their name implies, gestation crates are essentially steel cages that keep pregnant sows confined in a space roughly the size of their bodies. They’re commonly seen — along with battery cages for egg-laying hens — as among the least humane livestock practices. Animal behavior expert Temple Grandin describes gestation grates as the equivalent of “asking a sow to live in an airline seat” (without lavatory privileges).

Over the course of the last year, thanks to consumer demand, and an ongoing effort by HSUS, most major players in the fast food, grocery, and food service industries have gone — at least on paper — gestation crate-free. The list includes Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr., Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Kraft, and Hormel (the maker of Spam). Even Smithfield Foods — the nation’s largest pork producer — has agreed to phase out the crates by 2017.

So Sysco can’t, by any means, say it’s first to make the pledge (and the company has yet to specify a timeline for the switch), but its move might have the largest impact so far on the practices farmers are using on the ground.

“The power of Sysco is the size,” says Josh Balk, manager of corporate strategy at HSUS. “This will make it so much easier for smaller restaurants to adopt a no-gestation crate policy if they’d like — because it’s what their main distributor delivers. It will also change the buying practices of many companies who they deliver to without those companies even knowing it.”

It’s still hard to say how all this pledging — most of it attached to dates that are five to 10 years in the future — will truly impact animal agriculture, but Balk is optimistic. He says that although Smithfield still has five years to make the change, for instance, it does report the percentages of its corporate hog farms that have switched to so-called “group housing” in its last few annual reports. The agriculture giant Cargill has also reportedly moved 50 percent of its operations to group housing.

And of course there are notable holdouts. This spring we reported that Domino’s Pizza was applauded by the American Farm Bureau Federation when it announced it would not be following the trend (I’ll take a large meat lover’s with extra cruelty, please!). And Tyson Foods, says Balk, has been the “most outspoken opponent” of the change, and the most likely to actively defend the use of the crates.

Just how Tyson plans to do business in a system that is rapidly moving away from the practice is a mystery. But it’s likely that the company is hoping that consumer attention to the issue dies down before many of its partner companies (like Sysco, for instance) have to follow through on their pledges. But I have a feeling — if the HSUS has anything to do with it, at least — that probably won’t be the case.

Maybe not, but the stories we tell ourselves about our choice of yogurt, or soap, or hybrid car nonetheless say a lot about how we, as a society, view ourselves and our relationship to the world around us.

Professor Ursula Heise, eco-critic in Stanford University’s English department, spends her days untangling these narratives. She looks at everything from that yogurt carton to the Book of Revelation, dissecting how words, language, symbols, and discourse influence how environmental science is communicated, how the science itself is done, and how societies seek solutions to problems such as mass extinction and climate change.

Along the way, she says she’s found that some of our stories have become tired (i.e. the “end of the world” narrative first told in Revelation) and others at times delusional (see your grocery list). She also has a few new storylines to suggest for environmentalists and others who are serious about salvaging some scraps of the natural world.

“We need to shift from thinking about what ecosystems used to be, and how we can get back to an [environmental] baseline,” she says. “The conversation needs to be about to what kind of world we want for the future and to work toward that.”

Part of that conversation, of course, will be engaging our oversized role in shaping the world around us, now that we live in the Anthropocene, an era when humans have impacts on a planetary scale.

There is a sense, Heise says, “that from here on out we will self-consciously live in a world where nature is not the ‘other’ out there, but where nature is created by us. We will live in an environment that is synthetic, where even the most ‘natural’ parts of the environment will be human-made in some fundamental sense.”

In this interview, Heise covers topics ranging from the ivory-billed woodpecker to the horrors of factory farming, from string theory to science fiction — and yes, she talks about how we’ve convinced ourselves that what kind of yogurt we eat has some real bearing on the future of the planet.

Free MP3. (Right click, select “Save Link As.”)

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

Wolverines are loners, and they don’t like to share. They try not to hang out anywhere near other wolverines or other mammals, a social preference that some of us can relate to. And like other grumpy, anti-social creatures, wolverines do not like to share their food.

You’d think that they’d be safe by living in the coldest reaches of the planet, in the middle of snowy wastelands. But they cannot escape the pesky insects and microbes that find a way to live anywhere and that would be happy to feast on the food that wolverines have scared up. To defeat them, the wolverines keep their food in what’s basically a DIY refrigerator. National Geographic News reports:

Robert Inman of the Wildlife Conservation Society and colleagues assert that wolverines use cold, snow-covered structured chambers like crevices and those created by the rugged terrain of mountainous areas to cache food and protect it from other scavengers, insects and bacteria.

Unlike our lame refrigerators, wolverine refrigerators probably actually do reach sub-zero temperatures. Plus, since these fridges exist naturally, they’re energy efficient. And since their fridges have to defeat bacteria, wolverines probably don’t end up throwing away mountains of uneaten food, like we do. Not only aren’t humans the only creatures that have figured out how to preserve food, we’re not even the best at it.