托福口语宠物话题

　　And so it was not until twenty-five years later my life had room for a cat.

　　2. Mother Pays More Attention to Pet Dog Than to Her Young Boy

　　Dear Ann Landers: I hope you will publish your answer to this letter because there is a family out there that needs help-fast!

　　My friend(I’ll call her Krista) married a nice guy in 1978. He’s a sales rep on the road most of the time. Krista and Cal had a son five years ago. A nice family unit. About a month after Junior was born, Cal gave Krista a purebred beagle. She went crazy about the dog and treated his better than the baby.

　　When Junior was old enough to crawl, he began to pull the dog’s tail and hit him when he thought nobody was looking.

　　Two months age, Junior began urinating in unexpected and inappropriate places. First, into his mother’s shoe, then in her purse, next her jewel box. After he was punished for ruining the jewel box, he found some scissors and cut his mother’s string of pearls.

　　At first Krista attributed the urinating to Junior’s laziness. I told her if it were laziness, he would just wet his pants and not seek special places.

　　Last Christmas Day, it snowed heavily. I called Krista to chat. She sounded breathless. I asked her what she had been doing. "I’ve been playing outside in the snow with the dog," was her reply. I asked where Junior was. She replied, "Upstairs, watching television, I guess." What do you see here, Ann? Sign me - A Worried Friend.

　　3. Dogs Have a Sense of Humour

　　The question of whether dogs have a sense of humour is often fiercely argued, my own opinion is that some have and some haven’t. dachshunds have, but not St Bernards or Great Dames. Apparently a dog has to be small to be fond of joke. You never find a Great Dane trying to be a comedian.

　　But it is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts overdoing it. as an example of this I would point to Rudolph, a dachshund I once owned, whose slogan was "Anything for a Laugh". Dachshunds are always the worst offenders in their respect because of their peculiar shape. It is only natural that when a dog finds that his mere appearance makes the viewing public laugh he should imagine that Nature intended him to be a comedian.

　　I had a cottage at the time outside an English village, not far from a farm where they kept ducks, and one day the farmer called on me to say his ducks were disappearing and suspicion had fallen on my Rudolph. Why? I asked, and he said because mine was the only dog in the neigh-bourhood except his own Towser, and Towser had been so carefully trained that he would not touch a duck if you brought it to him with orange sauce over it.

　　I was very annoyed. I said he only had to gaze into Rudolph’s truthful brown eyes to see how baseless were his suspicions. Had he not, I asked, heard of foxes? How much more likely that a fox was the Bad Guy in the story. He was beginning to look doubtful and seemed about to make an apology, when Rudolph, who had been listening with the greatest interest and at a certain point had left the room, came trotting in with a duck in his mouth.

　　Yes, dachshunds overplay their sense of humour, and I suppose other dogs have their faults, but they seem unimportant compared with their virtues.

　　4. Man and Animal

　　In ancient Egypt, people believed that the cat was a god. When a cat died its owners showed their sadness by the strange habit of shaving their eyebrows off! More recently, in the last century in fact, the famous English writer Charles Dickens had a cat who was very fond of him. The cat didn’t like to see Dickens working too hard. At night, when the cat wanted to say "Stop writing!" to his master, he often put out Dicken’s candle with his paw!

　　When animals become pets, the result, after a number of generations, is a smaller animal with a smaller brain. Rabbits, for example, which live as pets in a garden, are much less intelligent than their wild cousins. Of course, man doesn’t always keep animals for pleasure. Many animals have to work for their masters.

　　There was once a farm in Namibia, Africa, which had 80 goats. Instead of a goatherd, there was a female baboon. She took her goats to the hills every day and brought them back at night. She always knew exactly which goats were hers-which is more than many humans could do!

　　5. Do Animals Communicate?

　　When we think of communication, we normally think of using words-talking face-to-face, writing messages and so on. But in fact we communicate far more in other ways. Our eyes and facial expressions usually tell the truth even when our words do not.

　　Then there are gestures, often unconscious: raising the eyebrows, rubbing the nose, shrugging the shoulders, tapping the fingers, nodding and shaking the head. There is also the even more subtle "body-language" of posture: are you sitting-or standing-with arms or legs crossed? Is that person standing with hands in pockets, held in front of the body or hidden behind? Even the way we dress and the colours we wear communicate things to others.

　　So, do animals communicate? Not in words, although a parrot might be trained to repeat words and phrases which it doesn’t understand. But, as we have learnt, there is more to communication than words.

　　Take dogs for example. They bare their teeth to warn, wag their tails to welcome and stand firm, with hair erect, to challenge. These signals are surely the canine equivalent of the human body-language of facial expression, gesture and posture.

　　Colour can be important means of communication for animals. Many birds and fish change colour, for example, to attract partners during the mating season. And mating itself is commonly preceded by a special dance in which both partners participate.

　　6. She’s All for the Birds!

　　Twice a week, 58-year-old Mrs. Winifred Cass shops in the market for her main supplies, "topping up" daily by calling at local shops on her way home from work. But she’s not buying family groceries!

　　She returns home laden with heavy bags of mixed hen corn, pigeon corn, peanuts and large packets of bird food to feed her larger "family," the wild birds of Leeds. And she’s been doing this for 16 years.

　　Daily, she feeds the birds which frequent her garden, the area around the shop where she works part-time, and several patches of waste-ground near her home. Then, twice every week, she loads the carrying basket with bags of grain on to her tricycle and sets out to pedal the 20-nubyte rude you to the city center.