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Time：高雄第6次例會，2007年09月30日（週日）下午2:30~5:30
Place：
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Topic:Domestication and feral cats
Source:新解析 遠東高中英文 第六冊
By Colin John Gread
殷非凡 等 編著 遠東圖書公司 出版
Cats and human beings go back a long way, over four thousand years in fact. When humans began to settle down in one place and harvest crops, stored grains became the target of rats and mice. The rats and mice attracted wild cats. Not surprisingly, humans welcomed the cats and encouraged them to stick around their settlements by leaving out scraps of food for them. Cats, and the idea of keeping cats around the home, gradually spread all around the world. Nowadays, cats are a part of the urban ecology. They have survived in cities, in part, due to their ability to search for food around humans.
Despite their seeming domestication as pets, cats remain, essentially, wild animals. Regardless of its parentage, if a kitten has no contact with humans for the first eight weeks of its life, then it is highly likely to become a feral, or wild, cat. Feral cats living among humans present few problems in themselves; they still continue to kill rats, mice, and other pets. It is only when their numbers become too great, thereby reducing the amount of food that is available to each feral cat, that they become a problem in that they begin to prey on species from the natural environment, including, at times, endangered species.
But killing a group, or colony, of feral cats has, in the part, proven to be ineffective in reducing their numbers. Other feral cats simply move in to fill the blank left behind and begin the breeding process all over again. An increasingly popular, and more humane, approach toward feral cats has been gaining ground in several countries over the past few years. Rather than being killed, feral cats are trapped in cages, taken to a vet to be neutered or spayed, and then returned to their colonies.
vocabulry:
1. Domestication 馴養;馴化
2. Parentage 出身,家系,門第
來源
父母的身分
3. Feral 野獸(所特有)的;兇猛的
4. Neuter (委婉語)閹割
5.spay 割除卵巢
questions:
1.Do you appreciate having cats around?
2.Do you approve of having stray animals neutered or spayed or mercy killing without consideration?
3.What do you think is the best solution to controlling the feral cat population?
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