Save the Animals

Animals are natural resources(资源) that people have wasted all through our history.

Animals have been killed for their fur and feathers(羽毛), for food, for sport, and simply because they were in the way. Thousands of kinds of animals have disappeared from the earth forever. Hundreds more are on the danger list today. About 170 kinds in the United States alone are considered in danger.

Why should people care? Because we need animals. And because once they are gone, there will never be any more.

Animals are more than just beautiful or interesting. They are more than just a source of food. Every animal has its place in the balance (平衡) of nature. Destroying one kind of animal can create many problems.

For example，when farmers killed large numbers of hawks(鹰), the farmers’ stores of corn and grain were destroyed by rats and mice. Why? Because hawks eat rats and mice. With no hawks to keep down their numbers, the rats and mice multiplied(繁殖) quickly.

Luckily, some people are working to help save the animals. Some groups raise money to let people know about the problem. And they try to get the governments to pass laws protecting animals in danger.

Quite a few countries have passed laws. These laws forbid(禁止) the killing of any animal or plant on the danger list. Slowly, the number of some animals in danger is growing.

In the long dispute over whether dogs are smarter than cats, a recent study published in the journal Learning & Behavior suggests that dogs are no more exceptional than other animals when it comes to smartness and intelligence.

The news is sure to cause the debate among dog owners and scientists who study dog behaviors. The authors reviewed existing studies and data on animal cognition(认知) and found that while dogs are smart and trainable, they are not ＂super smart＂ , despite what most dog owners will tell you. Dog research was quite popular in the 1990s and continues to be so. When it came to other animals, though, scientific studies on intelligence were barely involved in, despite evidence to suggest that horses, chimpanzees(黑猩猩) and cats had tricks of their own. Almost everything a dog claimed to do, other animals could do too.

Researchers set out to test the supposition. They compared dog cognition with members of three similar groups: meat-eating animals, social hunters and farm animals. Among the animals they studied were wolves, cats, chimpanzees, dolphins, horses and pigeons. What they found was that ＂dog cognition does not look exceptional.＂ Dogs cannot use tools, unlike dolphins, New Caledonian crows and chimpanzees, which have been observed using plant stems to fish for termites(白蚁). Homing pigeons are trained to fly home, sometimes crossing hundreds of miles of unfamiliar area. At the same time, farm animals share similar characters with their dog partners. Horses, like dogs, perform complex tasks. And cats? They have more in common with dogs than one might think. Still it is much easier to show intelligence in dogs because they like to be trained. Dogs are not smarter than they are supposed to be, given what they are.

My, what a big beak you have!

For humans, adapting to climate change will mostly be a matter of technology. More air conditioning, better-designed houses and bigger flood defenses may help to make the effects of a warmer world less harmful. 【小题1】 In a paper published in Trends & Evolution, a team led by Sara Ryding, a PhD candidate at Deakin University, shows that is already happening. Climate change is already altering the bodies of many animal species, giving them bigger beaks (喙), legs and ears.

In some species of Australian parrot, for instance, beak size has increased by between 4% and 10% since 1871. Another study, this time in North American dark-eyed juncos, another bird, found the same pattern. 【小题2】

All that is perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. “Allen’s rule”, named for Joel Asaph Allen, who suggested it in 1877, holds that warm-blooded animals in hot places tend to have larger body parts than those in temperate (温带的) regions. 【小题3】 Being richly filled with blood vessels, and not covered by feathers, beaks make an ideal place for birds to get rid of heat. Fennec foxes, meanwhile, which are native to the Sahara Desert, have strikingly large ears, especially compared with their Arctic cousins.

Ms. Ryding is not the first researcher to take that approach. But it is hard, when dealing with individual species, to prove that climate change was the cause of an anatomical (解剖学的) changes. All sorts of other factors, from changes in prey to the evolving reproductive preferences of males or females, might have been driving the changes. 【小题4】 The team combined data from different species in different places. Since they have little in common apart from living on a warming planet, climate change is the most reasonable explanation.

【小题5】 That may change as warming accelerates. Since any evolutionary adaptation comes with trade-offs (妥协), it is unclear how far the process might go. Bigger beaks might make feeding harder, for instance. Larger wings are heavier, and bigger legs cost more energy to grow.