More than a score of Australian rare mammals have been killed by wild cats. These predators, which arrived with European settlers, still threaten native wildlife — and are too plentiful on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small islands which were previously filled with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline (猫科的) — awareness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction programs, in order to try to make them cat-conscious.

Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are restricted to fragments of cat-free habitat. This will, however, put the forced migrants back in the sights of the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using stuffed models and the sorts of sounds made by cats, has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large natural enclosures with a scattering of predators might serve as a form of training camp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-ridden homes.

She tested this idea on a type of bandicoot (袋狸) that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised two hundred bandicoots in a huge enclosure that also contained five wild cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats. She left the animals to get on with life for two years, which, given that bandicoots breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a considerable period for them. After some predation (扑食) and probably some learning, she abstracted 21 bandicoots from each enclosure, attached radio transmitters to them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next. The outcome was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bandicoots brought up in a predator-free environment were much more likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous. How well bandicoots that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms Ross has at least provided reason for hope.

【小题1】What can be learned from the first paragraph?

A．The feline-awareness lessons have proved ineffective.

B．There are too many wild cats to be killed in Australia.

C．Different ways have been tried to hunt and kill wildlife.

D．Native wildlife has been threatened by a growing population of wild cats.

【小题2】The forced migrants in the second paragraph refer to ________.

A．Australian mammals restricted to certain areas

B．The wild cats tracking down the mammals

C．Wild animals involved in the program

D．The predators captured by the animal trainers

【小题3】Which of the following is TRUE about the first two enclosures?

A．They were both closely monitored.	B．They had 200 bandicoots in total.
C．They had similar natural environment.	D．They both had wild cats in them.

【小题4】What was the finding of Ms Ross’ research project?

A．Untrained bandicoots failed to identify cats.

B．Training bandicoots prepared them to fight cats.

C．Sleeping alone in the wild was dangerous.

D．Bandicoots could be trained to avoid predators.