Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens. As Annie Potts

admin2021-09-24  19

问题     Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.
    As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separation. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate (lesser) food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friends die.
    Pigs respond meaningfully to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the O’ s. Then the team switched from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs ventured only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not-in-considerable feat of reasoning.
    Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, cetaceans (鲸目动物) too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a perspective shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedures in laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.
    Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chicken, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will the breadth of our ethics start to catch up with the breadth of our science?
    Animal activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make changes in who we eat?
What is Paragraph 4 mainly about?

选项 A、The similarities between mammals and humans.
B、The necessity of long-term studies on mammals.
C、A change of public attitude to the treatment of mammals.
D、A new discovery of how mammals think and feel.

答案C

解析 主旨题。根据题干定位到原文第四段,第四段主要讲述了对野生哺乳动物长期的研究有助于我们形成社会视角的转变:大众不能再轻易地接受猴子在实验室中经受痛苦的实验;大象被迫在马戏团里表演;海豚被关在主题公园窄小的水池里。由此可以分析出C选项“公众对哺乳动物待遇的态度变化”为正确答案,故选C。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/vMGi777K
0

最新回复(0)