2019年经济学人 饥饿游戏（在线收听）

More than a score of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats.

二十多种澳大利亚哺乳动物已经被野猫灭绝了。

These predators, which arrived with European settlers, still threaten native wildlife—

这些和欧洲殖民者一起到来的捕食者仍然威胁着当地的野生动物—

and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small islands which were previously infested with them.

且数量庞大难以消灭，之前一些小岛野猫滋生，现在已被灭绝。

But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with the problem.

但是南威尔士大学的亚历山德拉·罗丝认为她有一种处理这个问题的不同方法。

As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology,

正如她发表在《Journal of Applied Ecology》上的一篇论文所写，

she is giving feline-awareness lessons to wild animals involved in reintroduction programmes, in order to try to make them cat-savvy.

她正在给重新引进项目中的野生动物进行‘注意猫科动物’的培训，为的是让它们熟悉猫科动物。

Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat.

很多澳大利亚哺乳动物，虽然并没有灭绝，却被限制在没有猫的栖息地内。

That offers the possibility of taking colonists from these refuges to places where a species once existed but is no more.

这为将避难所的殖民者带到一个物种灭绝之地提供了可能性。

This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of the cats that caused the problem in the first place.

但这将迫使这些移民者回到猫科动物的视野中，这是问题产生的根源。

Training the migrants while they are in captivity,

事实证明，利用猫的填充模型和各种猫叫声

using stuffed models and the sorts of sounds made by cats, has proved expensive and ineffective.

训练这些被圈养移民的方法即昂贵又无效。

Ms Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures with a scattering of predators

因此，罗丝女士想知道将它们和少量的捕食者放在大型自然围栏里是否可以

might serve as a form of boot camp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-ridden homes.

作为新兵训练营的一种形式，让它们做好准备，进入它们被猫占领的新家。

She tested this idea on greater bilbies, a type of bandicoot that superficially resembles a rabbit.

她在大兔耳袋狸身上测试了这种想法，这是一种看起来像兔子的袋狸。

She and her colleagues raised a couple of hundred bilbies in a huge enclosure that also contained five feral cats.

她和她的同事在一个巨大的围场里饲养了几百只兔耳袋狸，里边还有五只野猫。

As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats.

作为对照，她在一个类似的围场里饲养了几乎相同数量的兔耳袋狸，但里边没有野猫。

She left the animals to get on with life for two years,

她让这些动物独自生活了两年，

which, given that bilbies breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a substantial period for them.

鉴于兔耳袋狸每年繁殖四次，寿命约为八年，这对它们来说是相当长的一段时间。

After some predation and presumably some learning she abstracted 21 bilbies from each enclosure,

在进行了一些捕食和学习后，她从每个围场中抽取了21只兔耳袋狸，

fitted radio transmitters to them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it.

给它们安装无线电发射机，并将它们放进了第三个围场，其中有十只饥饿的野猫。

She then monitored what happened next. The upshot was that the training worked.

然后她进行了观察。结果，培训起作用了。

Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but only four of the trained ones.

在随后的40天里，十只未经培训的动物被猫吃掉了，而只有四只经过培训的猫被吃掉。

One particular behavioural difference she noticed was that bilbies brought up in a predator-free environment

她注意到了一个特别的行为差异—在没有捕食者环境中长大的兔耳袋狸

were much more likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous.

与那些在猫的陪伴下长大的袋狸相比，独自睡觉的可能性更大。当周围有猫时，独自入睡是很危险的。

How well bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen.

接受过这种极端训练的兔耳袋狸能否在野外生存还有待观察。

But Ms Ross has at least provided reason for hope.

但罗丝女士至少给了我们希望的理由。