每日英语:Our Unique Obsession With Rover And Fluffy
Recently, an almost literal case of lifeboat ethics occurred. On Aug. 4, Graham and Sheryl Anley, while yachting off the coast of South Africa, hit a reef, capsizing their boat. As the boat threatened to sink and they scrambled to get off, Sheryl's safety line snagged on something, trapping her there. Instead of freeing his wife and getting her to shore, Graham grabbed Rosie, their Jack Russell terrier. (One media account reported that Sheryl had insisted that the dog go first). With Rosie safe and sound, Graham returned for Sheryl. All are doing fine.
ethics:伦理学 yachting:游艇,帆船 reef:暗礁,礁石 capsizing:倾覆,翻覆 snag:抓住机会,障碍
It's a great story, but it doesn't strike me as especially newsworthy. News is supposed to be about something fairly unique, and recent research suggests that, in the right circumstances, lots of people also would have grabbed their Rosie first.
We have strange relationships with our pets, something examined in a wonderful book by the psychologist Hal Herzog, 'Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals.' We lavish our pets with adoration and better health care than billions of people receive. We speak to pets with the same high-pitched voices that we use for babies (though when addressing pets, we typically don't repeat and emphasize key words as we do with babies, in the hope of boosting their language acquisition). As a grotesque example of our feelings about pets, the Nazis had strict laws that guaranteed the humane treatment of the pets of Jews being shipped to death camps.
lavish:浪费,慷慨给予 adoration:崇拜,爱慕 grotesque:奇怪的,可笑的
These are unique ways for one species to interact with another. On occasion, a predatory cat, after killing an adult prey, adopts the prey's offspring for a few days; these cats are usually confused adolescent females, swirling with the start of those strange maternal urges. But there is certainly no other animal that puts costumes on members of another species on Halloween.
predatory:掠夺的,食肉的 adolescent:青春期的,未成熟的 swirling:漩涡,眩晕
A recent paper by Richard Topolski at George Regents University and colleagues, published in the journal Anthrozoos, demonstrates this human involvement with pets to a startling extent. Participants in the study were told a hypothetical scenario in which a bus is hurtling out of control, bearing down on a dog and a human. Which do you save? With responses from more than 500 people, the answer was that it depended: What kind of human and what kind of dog?
bear down on:冲向,加压于,袭击
Everyone would save a sibling, grandparent or close friend rather than a strange dog. But when people considered their own dog versus people less connected with them -- a distant cousin or a hometown stranger -- votes in favor of saving the dog came rolling in. And an astonishing 40% of respondents, including 46% of women, voted to save their dog over a foreign tourist. This makes Parisians' treatment of American tourists look good in comparison.
sibling:兄弟姐妹
What does a finding like this mean? First, that your odds aren't so good if you find yourself in another country with a bus bearing down on you and a cute dog. But it also points to something deeper: our unprecedented attitude toward animals, which got its start with the birth of humane societies in the 19th century.
unprecedented:空前的
We jail people who abuse animals, put ourselves in harm's way in boats between whales and whalers, carry our childhood traumas of what happened to Bambi's mother. We can extend empathy to another organism and feel its pain like no other species. But let's not be too proud of ourselves. As this study and too much of our history show, we're pretty selective about how we extend our humaneness to other human beings.
trauma:外伤,精神伤
每日英语:Our Unique Obsession With Rover And Fluffy的更多相关文章
- 每日英语:Success Outside the Dress Code
Anyone who has felt like the odd duck of the group can take heart from new research from Harvard Bus ...
- 每日英语:Proactive Advice for Dealing With Grief: Seek Out New Experiences
When her husband died of cancer 10 years ago, Becky Aikman says she experienced grief and adapted to ...
- 每日英语:How Pop Culture Influences Chinese Travelers
Where are Chinese tourists going to next? Pop culture may hold some clues, from blockbuster rom-com ...
- 每日英语:Booming Tech Sector Redraws the Map
China's high-tech companies have made their mark on the nation's economy. Now, with growing cash and ...
- 每日英语:The Benefits of a Better Men's T-Shirt
"I WEAR A T-shirt and jeans every single day," said Erik Schnakenberg, 30, co-founder of t ...
- 每日英语:A Chinese Father’s Most Important Job
When it comes to parenting, Chinese fathers say the most important role they play is that of the fam ...
- 每日英语:15 places to find inspiration
If you’re a writer or artist, you understand the power of location when it comes to creativity and f ...
- 每日英语:Nanjing's New Sifang Art Museum Illustrates China's Cultural Boom
In a forest on the outskirts of this former Chinese capital, 58-year-old real-estate developer Lu Ju ...
- 每日英语:Who Ruined The Humanities?
You've probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities ...
随机推荐
- tomcat之组成结构
1 - Tomcat Server的组成部分 1.1 - Server A Server element represents the entire Catalina servlet containe ...
- NI License Activator 用法
双击打开后,看到这种界面,将白色方格通过鼠标右击点绿就能够了. NI <wbr>License <wbr>Activator <wbr>用法 可能会出现这样的情况, ...
- java Socket Tcp 浏览器和服务器(二)
package cn.itcast.net.p2.ie_server; import java.io.IOException;import java.io.InputStream;import jav ...
- elasticsearch5.4体验
Elasticsearch是基于Lucene分布式.实时查询的搜索分析引擎.我目前应用在日志集中化处理上... 01.下载elasticsearch5.4 https://www.elasti ...
- 微信小程序-简易计算器
代码地址如下:http://www.demodashi.com/demo/14210.html 一.前期准备工作 软件环境:微信开发者工具 官方下载地址:https://mp.weixin.qq.co ...
- TP3.2校验微信公众号||小程序 服务器地址
1.在TP3.2里面,写一个控制器,用来校验微信公众号||小程序的服务器地址 <?php namespace Home\Controller; use Think\Controller; hea ...
- TP3.2中filed和find()使用
1.总结:filed和find(),进行一维数组查询指定字段时,可以进行配合使用,获得结果:key:value; 但官方没有明确指出. 2.filed和getFiled最终的结果是不一样的,一个获得的 ...
- PHP-VC9/VC6 TS/NTS等版本之间的区别
PHP的更新升级是越来越快了,PHP 5.2 版本已经更新到5.2.17不再更新, 5.3版本的更新到了5.3.8,PHP 5.4马上就要发布,甚至PHP6.0也在开发中.有这么多版本供我们选择,真是 ...
- 路径,通过navigation可以查看 *.class文件
?.class文件内的代码所在的文件的路径默认 举例1:读取项目根目录下的数据. private static void readRoot() throws FileNotFoundException ...
- java多线程(一)之继承Thread类
一.概述 进程:正在执行的应用程序 线程:进程的执行单元,执行路径 单线程:一个应用程序只有一条执行路径 多线程:一个应用程序有多条执行路径 二.两种实现方式, 下面为第一种方式: 继承Thread类 ...