Can zoos ever be animal-friendly?

The topic of our last class discussion was “How can zoos provide animals with a good life?” Everyone believed it was impossible for zoos to give animals a caring environment. Our teacher suggested that visiting a modern zoo might give us a new point of view.

【小题1】 In our discussion, many people said that zoos were full of smelly cages with unhappy animals living in. Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, however, was set in an attractive, open environment. Trees and flowers had been planted around the park. 【小题2】

At school, some people accused（指责）zoos of exploiting（剥削）animals for money but at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, as I see it, nothing could be further from the truth. 【小题3】

Before I visited Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, I wasn’t sure about the rights and wrongs of zoos. 【小题4】 I feel that, although zoos can’t provide the freedom of the wild, they can be animal-friendly by giving animals a safe and caring environment. As long as they do this well, to my mind they make a good contribution（贡献）to animal health. They also play an important part in educating us about wildlife. 【小题5】

On the bus back to school, we all agreed that what we liked most was the zoo’s environment and we would recommend（推荐）it for next year’s group.

It was in a large fish market northwest of Mumbai. Shark fins were sent onto tables. Tens of millions of sharks are killed for the fin trade every year, and a quarter of the world’s sharks, rays, and ghost sharks are in danger. The international trade in many animals is not allowed, but it can be nearly impossible for wildlife officials to tell whether the fins here are from protected animals.

The samples could be sent to a lab for DNA testing, but the test would take a full day. But Shaili Johri, a biology researcher at San Diego State University, had a handheld device that can say what animals a part belongs to in a short time, using only a small tissue (组织) sample. The gene sequencing (基因测序) done by the MinION device, which she was testing out at the fish market, is a promising new tool to help fight the illegal shark fin trade.

Johri published a study with another author in the journal Scientific Reports detailing the first use of the new device for keeping sharks and other wild animals safe from attacks. The smartphone-sized device is made by UK-based Oxford Nanopore Technologies. It has been used for the recognition of Ebola virus. It is also likely to help prevent wildlife crime.

It requires a small tissue sample and a laptop. It can show the result in three or four hours. But it has one downside. The device itself costs $1,000, including two initial cartridges (盒). Every subsequent sequencing cartridge, which can do 12 samples at once, costs an extra $500. That’s a roughly $42 per sample. The traditional DNA analysis method costs as little as $ 5 a sample.

Hollie Booth, a sharks and rays advisor, says the MinION could have lots of practical uses, including controlling wildlife trade across countries or illegal fishing in markets. And the possibilities of this device aren’t just limited to sharks. It could be used to recognize elephant ivory, pangolin scales (穿山甲鳞片) and various other wildlife.

Suppose you placed a baby in a room with a snake and a spider. Would he play with these creatures? Researchers in the study of fear are actively looking into it.

A fear of snake is one of the most common and strongest fears in the world, according to fear researcher, Judy Deloache, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the US, who was not involved in the new study.

Many people believe that we are innately (天生) scared of them, because some snakes are deadly. Seemingly in line with that, 11-month-old babies were shown images of a snake paired with either a fearful or a happy voice. The babies looked at the snakes for longer when a fearful voice was presented than when a happy voice was head. However, the study was not hard proof.

Now, a new study is re-assessing how babies react to snakes. The team measured babies physiological responses (生理反应) as they watched videos of snakes and elephants, paired with both fearful and happy voices. They then set out to startle the babies to see how they would react. They presented them with a “startle research”, which in this case was an unexpected bright flash of light as they watched a video.

“What we found is that their startle responses were not bigger when watching a video of a snake than watching a video of an elephant, even when paired with a fearful voice,” says co-author, Vansessa Lobue, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the US. Instead, the babies’ startle response was actually lower. Their heart response was also lower, which also indicates that babies were not scared. In other words, though the babies paid more attention to the snakes, this did not cause fear.

Children do not have an innate fear of snakes, agrees Deloache. “It’s not proper to have any hard-wired (硬连线的) fear,” she says, because it would limit a baby’s desire to explore new things.