In 2016, a young British father was trampled (踩踏) to death by an elephant on the island of Koh Samui (苏梅岛) in Thailand. The 【小题1】 once again raised questions over whether it is ethical to use these giant animals as entertainment.

For many visitors, the chance to 【小题2】 with elephants is at the top of their holiday wish list. There’s no shortage of opportunities to do so, from taking photos of baby elephants on the beach, to riding them through the jungle, to watching them balance on tightropes and dance.

But what most visitors don’t realize is these animals are involved in 【小题3】 cruel methods to make them behave. They are often kept in terrible conditions. This includes being 【小题4】 up when not performing, without interaction with other elephants, a poor diet, etc. They are also subjected to training practices including beating and stabbing (刺,戳) with hooks.

Away from their natural habitat and forced to repeat the same routines day in day out, the torture continues throughout their 【小题5】 shortened lives. It’s not exactly the stuff that holiday dreams are made of.

Unfortunately, riding elephants is still one of the most popular tourist activities in Asia. The World Animal Protection 【小题6】 3,000 elephants at tourist sites across Southeast Asia in 2017. The study found that 77% of them were living in“severely cruel”conditions. It also found that there had been a 30% rise in the number of elephants at tourism venues in Thailand since 2010.   

Many parks 【小题7】 themselves as sanctuaries (庇护所) but they are not. Real sanctuaries will 【小题8】 contact with the elephants and visitors can only observe them from a distance most of the time.

The tour sector needs to play a much bigger role in restricting elephant tourism. As travelers, please avoid any place offering riding or allowing interacting sessions with elephants. When you see abuse (虐待) 【小题9】, do your bit by leaving your review on review sites and social media to warn other tourists. It really does work—many parks are now becoming 【小题10】 as a result of pressure from tourists, the industry and the media.

Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the 【小题1】 requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly 【小题2】 to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at 【小题3】-he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets 【小题4】 or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

Human children, on the other hand, are extremely 【小题5】. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands 【小题6】 trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught but naturally 【小题7】 in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave 【小题8】. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive (认知的) skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomasello, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were 【小题9】 better at understanding the social world. The core of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can 【小题10】 what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

“When a snow leopard follows its prey (猎物) among the mountain walls, it moves... softly, slowly,” explains Indian biologist Raghunandan, who has studied animals for years. “If it knocks a stone loose, it will 【小题1】 out a foot to stop it from falling and making noise.” One might be moving right now, 【小题2】 silent, maybe close by. But where?

Best known for its 【小题3】 coat and long distinctive tail, the snow leopard is one of the world’s most secretive animals. These big cats can only be found high in the remote, 【小题4】 regions of Central Asia. For this reason, and because they hunt 【小题5】 at night, they are very rarely seen.

Snow leopards have been officially protected since 1975, but enforcing this law has proven difficult. Many continue to be killed for their fur and body parts, which are 【小题6】 a fortune on the black market. In recent years, though, conflict with local herders (牧人) has also led to a number of snow leopard deaths. This is because the big cats kill the herders’ animals, and drag the bodies away high up in the mountains to eat. Thus, the herders’ animals are in danger of snow leopard attacks, which can push those herders into desperate poverty. To address this problem, local religious leaders have called for an end to snow leopard killings, saying that these wild animals have the 【小题7】 to exist peacefully. They’ve also tried to 【小题8】 people that it is of great importance to protect those big cats.

As a result of these pressures, the 【小题9】 snow leopard population is estimated at only 4,000 to 7,000, and some fear that the actual number may already have dropped below 3,500．The only way to 【小题10】 this trend and bring these cats back from their threatened status, say conservationists, is to make them more valuable alive than dead.