Feral

LA BELLE, Fla. -- Red Sox reliever Mike Timlin is going to extraordinary lengths for good, fresh barbecue. It's late in the afternoon and he's dressed in camouflage, sitting in a blind 12 1/2 feet above the fringe of the Everglades. His famous right pitching arm is just inches away from a loaded bow and arrow. The intended target earlier in the February day at spring training in Fort Myers was Jason Varitek's glove. But now it is a feral hog that Timlin hopes will wander into his crosshairs sometime around dusk.

ON WGBH Greater Boston 7 p.m. WGBH (Channel 2) SeaWorld, in town for The Boston Globe Travel Show, brings to the set a bald eagle, kookaburra, sloth, lemur, and more. ON CHRONICLE Cats (not the musical) 7:30 p.m. WCVB-TV (Channel 5) Visit a feline show, search for feral cats, and stop at an animal emergency room where fat cats are a concern. RADIO HIGHLIGHTS Tent Show Radio 5 a.m. Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua. The Callie Crossley Show 1 p.m. WGBH-FM (89.7)

What if you were a 4-year-old boy, abandoned in Moscow in the bitter winter cold? Would you wander off with a pack of feral dogs and, over time, assimilate to the point of becoming one of them? Preposterous questions? Yet these are the premises of “Dog Boy,’’ a disturbing novel by Australian writer Eva Hornung (also known as Eva Sallis), who has won several Australian writing prizes and was nominated for that nation’s National Fiction Award. Hornung took her inspiration from the apparently true account of a Russian boy named Ivan Mishukov, who lived with a pack of dogs for a period...

Feline facts ►There are 45 cats born for every household in the United States; with those numbers, not all cats will live in a home. ►Massachusetts is the only state in New England that doesn't have a spay/neuter program set up by the Department of Agriculture. ►Euthanasia is the number one documented cause of death of all cats in the United States. According to a 2006 National Animal Control Association statistical survey, 66 percent of cats in shelters are killed.

TSOTSI (Comcast Movies: All Movies) This foreign-language Oscar-winner from South Africa is an earnest drama of moral redemption that puts old cliches in an unfamiliar setting. (That’s why it won.) Newcomer Presley Chweneyagae plays a feral street thug whose conscience stirs when he accidentally carjacks an infant. Based on a novel written by the young Athol Fugard, it’s been repurposed for the post-apartheid era to mixed results. In “tsotsi-taal’’ and Afrikaans, with subtitles.

Those who lean more toward Brian Eno’s ambient works than his more vocal excursions (see: 2005’s “Another Day on Earth’’) will be delighted to spend some time with this often thrilling 15-track stack of new instrumental pieces. But if you’re holding out for compositions that recall his seminal output through the ’70s, you may be getting more than you bargained for. “Music for Airports’’ this is not. “Small Craft on a Milk Sea’’ — a collaboration between Eno, electronic musician Jon Hopkins, and guitarist Leo Abraham — sets sail from Eno’s familiar lexicon of extended...

ON WGBH Greater Boston 7 p.m. WGBH (Channel 2) SeaWorld, in town for The Boston Globe Travel Show, brings to the set a bald eagle, kookaburra, sloth, lemur, and more. ON CHRONICLE Cats (not the musical) 7:30 p.m. WCVB-TV (Channel 5) Visit a feline show, search for feral cats, and stop at an animal emergency room where fat cats are a concern. RADIO HIGHLIGHTS Tent Show Radio 5 a.m. Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua. The Callie Crossley Show 1 p.m. WGBH-FM (89.7)

Which is more revealing: the mundane action we repeat every day, or our response to an extraordinary event that will never come again? Anyone familiar with the work of T.C. Boyle already knows his answer: crisis all the way. In “Wild Child,’’ his exhilarating new collection of short stories, Boyle captures characters facing a range of critical turning points. Some of these moments are quiet: An unexpected emotional connection is made in a rundown recording studio (“Three Quarters of the Way to Hell”)

There is a lovely mix of hope, suspicion, concern, and desire that is experienced when one picks up a book with the heft of "Canada," Richard Ford's new novel about — well, about more than a few things, as befits a volume of its breadth, pace, and density. Ford's narrator is Dell Parsons, a retiring teacher, who tells the story largely from the point of view of his 15-year-old self. Young Dell is a sensitive teen whose life and family are broken apart in the book's first half when his financially-troubled parents rob a North Dakota bank in 1960.

Feline facts ►There are 45 cats born for every household in the United States; with those numbers, not all cats will live in a home. ►Massachusetts is the only state in New England that doesn't have a spay/neuter program set up by the Department of Agriculture. ►Euthanasia is the number one documented cause of death of all cats in the United States. According to a 2006 National Animal Control Association statistical survey, 66 percent of cats in shelters are killed.

VALLEY FALLS, N.Y. - Wildlife officials in New York may ban captive boar hunts as they try to curb a growing feral hog population before it gets as bad as it is in Southern states, where roaming droves have devastated crops and wildlife habitat with their rooting, wallowing, and voracious foraging. Feral swine are breeding in three counties in central New York, according to a federal study done last year with funding from New York's Invasive Species Council. The wild population statewide is likely in the hundreds, said Gordon Batcheller, head of the state Department of Environmental...

TSOTSI (Comcast Movies: All Movies) This foreign-language Oscar-winner from South Africa is an earnest drama of moral redemption that puts old cliches in an unfamiliar setting. (That’s why it won.) Newcomer Presley Chweneyagae plays a feral street thug whose conscience stirs when he accidentally carjacks an infant. Based on a novel written by the young Athol Fugard, it’s been repurposed for the post-apartheid era to mixed results. In “tsotsi-taal’’ and Afrikaans, with subtitles.

Those who lean more toward Brian Eno’s ambient works than his more vocal excursions (see: 2005’s “Another Day on Earth’’) will be delighted to spend some time with this often thrilling 15-track stack of new instrumental pieces. But if you’re holding out for compositions that recall his seminal output through the ’70s, you may be getting more than you bargained for. “Music for Airports’’ this is not. “Small Craft on a Milk Sea’’ — a collaboration between Eno, electronic musician Jon Hopkins, and guitarist Leo Abraham — sets sail from Eno’s familiar lexicon of extended...

What if you were a 4-year-old boy, abandoned in Moscow in the bitter winter cold? Would you wander off with a pack of feral dogs and, over time, assimilate to the point of becoming one of them? Preposterous questions? Yet these are the premises of “Dog Boy,’’ a disturbing novel by Australian writer Eva Hornung (also known as Eva Sallis), who has won several Australian writing prizes and was nominated for that nation’s National Fiction Award. Hornung took her inspiration from the apparently true account of a Russian boy named Ivan Mishukov, who lived with a pack of dogs for a period...

Which is more revealing: the mundane action we repeat every day, or our response to an extraordinary event that will never come again? Anyone familiar with the work of T.C. Boyle already knows his answer: crisis all the way. In “Wild Child,’’ his exhilarating new collection of short stories, Boyle captures characters facing a range of critical turning points. Some of these moments are quiet: An unexpected emotional connection is made in a rundown recording studio (“Three Quarters of the Way to Hell”)

LA BELLE, Fla. -- Red Sox reliever Mike Timlin is going to extraordinary lengths for good, fresh barbecue. It's late in the afternoon and he's dressed in camouflage, sitting in a blind 12 1/2 feet above the fringe of the Everglades. His famous right pitching arm is just inches away from a loaded bow and arrow. The intended target earlier in the February day at spring training in Fort Myers was Jason Varitek's glove. But now it is a feral hog that Timlin hopes will wander into his crosshairs sometime around dusk.

VALLEY FALLS, N.Y. - Wildlife officials in New York may ban captive boar hunts as they try to curb a growing feral hog population before it gets as bad as it is in Southern states, where roaming droves have devastated crops and wildlife habitat with their rooting, wallowing, and voracious foraging. Feral swine are breeding in three counties in central New York, according to a federal study done last year with funding from New York's Invasive Species Council. The wild population statewide is likely in the hundreds, said Gordon Batcheller, head of the state Department of Environmental...

Ted Kaczynski — the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber, who is serving life in prison for sending deadly mail bombs — will not be able to attend his 50th class reunion at Harvard College. But he did contribute a bizarre entry to the alumni report for the class of 1962. While many of his classmates sent in lengthy updates on their lives for the 2½-inch-thick "red book," the entry for Theodore John Kaczynski contains only nine lines. The listing says his occupation is "prisoner," and his home address is "No. 04475-046, US Penitentiary —...