17-6-23 【英语演讲】万物有灵且美—动物真的有心智有感觉吗？值得人类深入探索

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What are animalsthinking and feeling?

Section 1：

Have you everwondered what animals think and feel? There arecapacitiesof the humanmind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. But is thattrue?

The first thingto remember is that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, abird or you. If you give a crayfish a lot of little tiny electric shocks everytime it tries to come out of its burrow, it will develop anxiety. If you givethe crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxesand comes out and explores. How do we show how much we care about crayfishanxiety? Mostly, we boil them. Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes andthey recognize human faces. How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence ofthis invertebrate? Mostly boiled.

Sea otters usetools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies whatto do, which is called teaching. We have the sameimperatives: take careof our babies, find food, try to stay alive. We are basically the same. We arekin under the skin.

Vocabulary:

Capacity,imperative

Section 2：

This is anelephant named Philo. He was a young male. This is him four days later. Humansnot only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. We want to carve theirteeth. Why can't we wait for them to die?

We cause so muchpain to them. The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? Whydon't they eat us? Why is it that killer whales have returned to researcherslost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted? How could dolphinsknow that one of the human hearts had just stopped? Why would they care? Andwhy would itspookthem? These mysterious things just hint at all of thethings that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almostnever think about at all.

At an aquariumin South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. And one daya keeper took a cigarette break, smoking. Dolly came over and looked at him,and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like smoke. When humanbeings use one thing to represent another, we call that art.

Vocabulary:

spook

Section 3：

The things thatmake us human are not the things that we think make us human. What makes ushuman is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we arethe most extreme. We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creativeand mostdestructiveanimal that has ever been on this planet, and weare all of those things alljumbled uptogether. But love is not thething that makes us human. It's not special to us. Passing life from onegeneration to the next is the chain of being. If that stops, it all goes away.

When we welcomenew human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of othercreatures. We paint animals on the walls. We don't paint cell phones. We don'tpaint work cubicles. We paint animals to show them that we are not alone. Wehave company. And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark,deemedworthy ofsalvationis inmortaldanger now, and their flood isus. We're going to ask another question. Are we capable of using what we haveto care enough to simply let them continue?

Vocabulary:

Destructive,jumble up, deem, salvation, mortal