美国国家公共电台 NPR Who Cares If They're Cute? This Zoologist Accepts Animals On Their Own Terms

 

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Lucy Cooke is the founder¹ of the Sloth² Appreciation³ Society. Their motto - being fast is overrated. Of course, that's not her only claim to fame. Cooke is an Oxford-trained zoologist⁴ and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. And in her new book, "The Truth About Animals," she sets the record straight about sloths⁵ and other much misunderstood creatures. A warning to our listeners, we will be discussing animal sex a lot. She joins us now in the studio. Hello.

LUCY COOKE: Hello there.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So this book takes us deep into the history of not only animals but how humans have studied the animal kingdom. Why did you write this book?

COOKE: It was the sloth that really inspired me because I get asked a lot, how can sloths exist when they're such losers? And people think that because the animal is slow that it's somehow useless and redundant⁶. An actual fact - they are incredibly successful creatures. So the sloth is not the only animal that's been misunderstood in this way. And I thought it was time that we rebranded the animal kingdom according to fact and not sentimentality because we have a habit of viewing the animal kingdom through the prism of our own rather narrow existence and judging animals on our terms. So I thought there were quite a lot of wrongs that needed to be righted.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And, you know, we are going to talk about quite a few of them because you have a lot of interesting things to say about a lot of these animals. But I want to start with the sloth. I lived and worked in Latin America, where the sloth obviously lives. And they get a bad rap. What should people know that they don't?

COOKE: Well, people think that being slow is second-rate, and we are obsessed⁷ with moving faster than nature intended. But actual fact - sloths are energy-saving icons⁸. And they are incredibly successful because of their slothful nature. The sloth is an inverted⁹ quadruped, so it hangs from the trees. To hang like that is an incredibly energy-saving existence because, you know, if you're an upright existence, you need much more muscles to hold yourself upright. And the sloth actually only has 50 percent of the muscle mass of a comparable mammal that lives in upright existence. But the problem is when you turn the sloth the other way up...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: They look slow. They look like they're not really doing much. And so we're not looking at them in the right way.

COOKE: Yeah, gravity removes their dignity, basically. So they sort of sprawl¹⁰ like a pancake on the ground. And that's how the first explorers would have seen them because they would have been taken out of the trees. Do you know what I mean? And they're crawling helplessly along the ground.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But you do note - and I have to say this - that they are drug addicts¹¹.

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: Yeah, there's an island off the coast of Panama that is home to a species of sloth that is a dwarf¹² sloth. It's the pygmy sloth. And those sloths live in the mangrove¹³ swamps, where they graze off an algae¹⁴ that has alkaloids in it with a similar property to valium. So they don't just look stoned. They are stoned.

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: It's an island of pygmy baked sloths...

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: ...Which you might think is something of an evolutionary¹⁵ cul-de-sac. But there's no natural predators¹⁶ on the island. And by slowing down their metabolism¹⁷ so much, they're saving even more energy.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Now we're going to get to the nitty-gritty. I want to talk about penguin¹⁸ sex.

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: Be warned. Be warned, listeners. Yeah. Well, I mean, penguins¹⁹ are one of those creatures that have been totally misunderstood. We always think of them as being great parents, monogamous...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.

COOKE: ...Fantastically faithful. The movie "March Of The Penguins" has much to blame, actually, because the thing about penguins is these are birds with tiny brains. They live in a very harsh environment. It's brutal²⁰ living in the Antarctic. And so they are flooded with hormones²¹ that make them basically have sex with anything that moves and quite a few things that don't move, like dead penguins, for instance. So, you know, they...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. I didn't see that in the "March of the Penguins" or in the many other penguin movies I've seen. Why is it? That seems so strange to me.

COOKE: Yeah, they left out the pathologically unpleasant necrophiliacs from the lineup. So the males are basically having sex with anything that moves. And the females are one of the only animals on the planet that we know of, other than ourselves, that engages in prostitution. So the females will make use of these randy males by coercing²² sad singletons into having sex with them in exchange for pebbles²³.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow.

COOKE: Yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's amazing.

COOKE: Yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I was also happy to read that hyena²⁴ colonies are run by women.

COOKE: So this is an interesting thing. The other day I was reading - I think it was the New York Times, even - described Harvey Weinstein as a hyena. And I thought to myself, that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever read because hyenas²⁵ - they come from a matriarchal society. Most people think they're all scavengers. They're not. They are highly successful predators, really, really intelligent.

So the amazing thing about hyenas is that they - in the ancient bestiaries, they thought that they were hermaphrodites. And that's fair enough that they made that mistake because the female hyena's genitalia is a perfect facsimile of the males. She has what's described in polite zoological circles as a pseudo-penis. And she also has a fake scrotum. So I think it's really interesting to trace back where a lot of these myths came from and to find that some of the mistakes and the preconceptions we have - they date all the way back to Greek, Roman and Medieval times.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I just have to bring this up because no conversation is complete without pandas. You know, you write that humans are preprogrammed to want to nurture²⁶ anything with baby-like features, hence our obsession²⁷ with pandas. What do we get wrong about them?

COOKE: Well, the thing about pandas is that they look like wobbly, little toddlers. They've got these sorts of baby-like features. So they trigger the reward centers in our brain to wanting to nurture them. And because of that, we don't think of them as bad. We think of them as helpless evolutionary mishaps²⁸ that can't survive without our help. And so a lot of the conservation has been centered around captive breeding efforts in China and sort of micromanaging the bear's lives. And the insinuation is that they can't survive in the wild without us. And this is complete rubbish. What we need to do is the reverse. We need to leave them alone but just leave them with enough bamboo forest because pandas - we think of them as being - very famously, they're rubbish at sex. You know, papers love to scream headlines - oh, zoo panda failed to do it again.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, they don't want to breed in captivity²⁹. But you make the point - and I think it's a really valid³⁰ point - who wants to have sex in a concrete enclosure surrounded by glass (laughter)?

COOKE: Exactly. The panda needs the equivalent of a nice glass of wine and a bit of Barry White in order to get in the mood.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).

COOKE: And they - pandas are just as choosy as humans are. And so it's very difficult breeding in captivity because you have to understand what these complex behavioral environmental cues are in order to get the animals to do it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I guess in one way, what you're saying is that we're loving them to death. But isn't the other argument that if we anthropomorphize animals, it's a way of sort of valuing them, and it is a way of increasing our consciousness about conservation and about other issues? Getting children involved in going to zoos and really understanding these animals. Isn't there an argument to be made for that?

COOKE: Yeah, but I think we're choosy about what we like and we don't like. You know, so vultures for instance - vulture populations have crashed in India of late by 99 percent. And that has cost the government billions, billions in an increase in disease and rabies and stray dogs. But vulture conservationists - they can't get anybody to donate money to them because nobody likes them because they look like the Grim Reaper³¹, and they eat dead things for a living. You know, but we need them, just as much as we need the pandas. So, you know, I'm trying to sort of stop people from projecting ourselves and our values onto animals and to see them for what they are and what they do and not choose favorites.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lucy Cooke's new book is "The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, And Other Tales From The Wild Side Of Wildlife." Thank you so much.

COOKE: My pleasure. Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MICHAEL GIACCHINO'S "SUITE FROM ZOOTOPIA")

1 Founder   

n.创始者，缔造者

参考例句：

• He was extolled as the founder of their Florentine school.他被称颂为佛罗伦萨画派的鼻祖。
• According to the old tradition,Romulus was the founder of Rome.按照古老的传说，罗穆卢斯是古罗马的建国者。

2 sloth   

n.[动]树懒；懒惰，懒散

参考例句：

• Absence of competition makes for sloth.没有竞争会导致懒惰。
• The sloth spends most of its time hanging upside down from the branches.大部分时间里树懒都是倒挂在树枝上。

3 appreciation   

n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨

参考例句：

• I would like to express my appreciation and thanks to you all.我想对你们所有人表达我的感激和谢意。
• I'll be sending them a donation in appreciation of their help.我将送给他们一笔捐款以感谢他们的帮助。

4 zoologist   

n.动物学家

参考例句：

• Charles darwin was a famous zoologist.查尔斯达尔文是一位著名的动物学家。
• The zoologist had spent a long time living with monkeys.这位动物学家与猴子一起生活了很长时间。

5 sloths   

懒散( sloth的名词复数 )； 懒惰； 树獭； （经济）停滞。

参考例句：

• Mummies of pleistocene ground sloths, with original skin, hair, tendons and claws have been found. 还发现了保存原有皮肤，毛发，腱和爪的更新世时期地面树懒的木乃伊。
• He was inspired by fossils of armadillos and sloths. 犰狳和树懒化石让他获得了灵感。

6 redundant   

adj.多余的，过剩的；(食物)丰富的；被解雇的

参考例句：

• There are too many redundant words in this book.这本书里多余的词太多。
• Nearly all the redundant worker have been absorbed into other departments.几乎所有冗员，都已调往其他部门任职。

7 obsessed   

adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的

参考例句：

• He's obsessed by computers. 他迷上了电脑。
• The fear of death obsessed him throughout his old life. 他晚年一直受着死亡恐惧的困扰。

8 icons   

n.偶像( icon的名词复数 )；（计算机屏幕上表示命令、程序的）符号，图像

参考例句：

• Distinguish important text items in lists with graphic icons. 用图标来区分重要的文本项。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• Daemonic icons should only be employed persistently if they provide continuous, useful status information. 只有会连续地提供有用状态信息的情况下，后台应用程序才应该一直使用图标。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓

9 inverted   

adj.反向的，倒转的v.使倒置，使反转( invert的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Only direct speech should go inside inverted commas. 只有直接引语应放在引号内。
• Inverted flight is an acrobatic manoeuvre of the plane. 倒飞是飞机的一种特技动作。 来自《简明英汉词典》

10 sprawl   

vi.躺卧，扩张，蔓延；vt.使蔓延；n.躺卧，蔓延

参考例句：

• In our garden,bushes are allowed to sprawl as they will.在我们园子里，灌木丛爱怎么蔓延就怎么蔓延。
• He is lying in a sprawl on the bed.他伸开四肢躺在床上。

11 addicts   

有…瘾的人( addict的名词复数 )； 入迷的人

参考例句：

• a unit for rehabilitating drug addicts 帮助吸毒者恢复正常生活的机构
• There is counseling to help Internet addicts?even online. 有咨询机构帮助网络沉迷者。 来自超越目标英语 第3册

12 dwarf   

n.矮子，侏儒，矮小的动植物；vt.使…矮小

参考例句：

• The dwarf's long arms were not proportional to his height.那侏儒的长臂与他的身高不成比例。
• The dwarf shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. 矮子耸耸肩膀，摇摇头。

13 mangrove   

n.(植物)红树，红树林

参考例句：

• It is the world's largest tidal mangrove forest.它是世界上最大的红树林沼泽地。
• Many consider this the most beautiful mangrove forest in all Thailand.许多人认为这里是全泰国最美丽的红树林了。

14 algae   

n.水藻，海藻

参考例句：

• Most algae live in water.多数藻类生长在水中。
• Algae grow and spread quickly in the lake.湖中水藻滋蔓。

15 evolutionary   

adj.进化的；演化的，演变的；[生]进化论的

参考例句：

• Life has its own evolutionary process.生命有其自身的进化过程。
• These are fascinating questions to be resolved by the evolutionary studies of plants.这些十分吸引人的问题将在研究植物进化过程中得以解决。

16 predators   

n.食肉动物( predator的名词复数 )；奴役他人者（尤指在财务或性关系方面）

参考例句：

• birds and their earthbound predators 鸟和地面上捕食它们的动物
• The eyes of predators are highly sensitive to the slightest movement. 捕食性动物的眼睛能感觉到最细小的动静。 来自《简明英汉词典》

17 metabolism   

n.新陈代谢

参考例句：

• After years of dieting,Carol's metabolism was completely out of whack.经过数年的节食，卡罗尔的新陈代谢完全紊乱了。
• All living matter undergoes a process of metabolism.生物都有新陈代谢。

18 penguin   

n.企鹅

参考例句：

• The penguin is a flightless bird.企鹅是一种不会飞的鸟。
• He walked with an awkward gait like a penguin.他走路的步子难看得就像企鹅。

19 penguins   

n.企鹅( penguin的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Why can penguins live in cold environment? 为什么企鹅能生活在寒冷的环境中？ 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Whales, seals, penguins, and turtles have flippers. 鲸、海豹，企鹅和海龟均有鳍形肢。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

20 brutal   

adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的

参考例句：

• She has to face the brutal reality.她不得不去面对冷酷的现实。
• They're brutal people behind their civilised veneer.他们表面上温文有礼，骨子里却是野蛮残忍。

21 hormones   

n. 荷尔蒙，激素 名词hormone的复数形式

参考例句：

• This hormone interacts closely with other hormones in the body. 这种荷尔蒙与体內其他荷尔蒙紧密地相互作用。
• The adrenals produce a large per cent of a man's sex hormones. 肾上腺分泌人体的大部分性激素。

22 coercing   

v.迫使做( coerce的现在分词 )；强迫；（以武力、惩罚、威胁等手段）控制；支配

参考例句：

• All of the children had atopic dermatis coercing at least 20% of their body surface area. 所有的患儿体表有超过20%的遗传性过敏症皮炎感染。 来自互联网
• I assured him that we had no intention of coercing Israel in response a Soviet threat. 我向他保证，我们无意强迫以色列对苏联的威胁做出反映。 来自互联网

23 pebbles   

[复数]鹅卵石； 沙砾； 卵石，小圆石( pebble的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The pebbles of the drive crunched under his feet. 汽车道上的小石子在他脚底下喀嚓作响。
• Line the pots with pebbles to ensure good drainage. 在罐子里铺一层鹅卵石，以确保排水良好。

24 hyena   

n.土狼，鬣狗

参考例句：

• African hyena noted for its distinctive howl.非洲鬣狗，以其特别的嚎叫而闻名。
• The hyena's public image is not aided by its ridiculous appearance.鬣狗滑稽的外表无助于改善它在公众心中的形象。

25 hyenas   

n.鬣狗( hyena的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• These animals were the prey of hyenas. 这些动物是鬣狗的猎物。 来自辞典例句
• We detest with horror the duplicity and villainy of the murderous hyenas of Bukharinite wreckers. 我们非常憎恨布哈林那帮两面三刀、杀人破坏，干尽坏事的豺狼。 来自辞典例句

26 nurture   

n.养育，照顾，教育；滋养，营养品；vt.养育，给与营养物，教养，扶持

参考例句：

• The tree grows well in his nurture.在他的培育下这棵树长得很好。
• The two sisters had received very different nurture.这俩个姊妹接受过极不同的教育。

27 obsession   

n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感)

参考例句：

• I was suffering from obsession that my career would be ended.那时的我陷入了我的事业有可能就此终止的困扰当中。
• She would try to forget her obsession with Christopher.她会努力忘记对克里斯托弗的迷恋。

28 mishaps   

n.轻微的事故，小的意外( mishap的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• a series of mishaps 一连串的倒霉事
• In spite of one or two minor mishaps everything was going swimmingly. 尽管遇到了一两件小小的不幸，一切都进行得很顺利。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

29 captivity   

n.囚禁；被俘；束缚

参考例句：

• A zoo is a place where live animals are kept in captivity for the public to see.动物园是圈养动物以供公众观看的场所。
• He was held in captivity for three years.他被囚禁叁年。

30 valid   

adj.有确实根据的；有效的；正当的，合法的

参考例句：

• His claim to own the house is valid.他主张对此屋的所有权有效。
• Do you have valid reasons for your absence?你的缺席有正当理由吗？

31 reaper   

n.收割者，收割机

参考例句：

• The painting is organized about a young reaper enjoying his noonday rest.这幅画的画面设计成一个年轻的割禾人在午间休息。
• A rabbit got caught in the blades of the reaper.一只兔子被卷到收割机的刀刃中去了。