評論
打印
The business world is sometimes described figuratively as dog eat dog. In the state of Maharashtra in western India the situation is literally cat eat dog. Where the cats are leopards and the dogs are, well, dogs. That's the finding of a Wildlife Conservation Society study published in the journal Oryx.
有時，人們會形象地把商業界比喻成狗咬狗的世界。然而，該情況在印度西部的馬哈拉施特拉邦城卻不同，這里被比喻為貓吃狗的世界。馬哈拉施特拉邦城中的貓都是貍貓，狗呢？當然還是狗。上述研究由野生動物保護協會發表在Oryx雜志上。
The paper points out that big cat ecology and predator prey interactions in tropical regions are typically studied in natural systems. The majority of the prey in those cases are ungulates: think zebras or deer. But in human-dominated areas, especially agricultural ones, you can have large populations of domesticated animals—a big attraction for any hungry wildlife.
文中指出：在自然體系中，科學家熱衷于研究熱帶地區的大型貓科動物學和捕食者與被捕食者之間的相互作用。熱帶地區的被捕食者大多都是有蹄動物，比如：斑馬和鹿。而在人類居住的地方，尤其是在以農業為主的地方，人類可以大量馴養家畜——這對那些饑腸轆轆的野生動物來說無疑是個巨大的誘惑。
Researchers examined 85 leopard scats, because that's how you do this kind of research. And 87 percent of the prey biomass they recovered was from domestic animals, with nearly half of that coming from dogs, many of them presumably feral.
根據常理，科學家們對85只貍貓展開了調查。他們發現：家畜占了被捕食者生物量的87%，其中狗的數量接近一半，這些狗可能大部分是野生的。
Livestock make up only a small part of the leopard diet. For example, goats outnumber dogs seven to one, but are just 11 percent of meals for the cats, probably because they're penned in at night. Those numbers are good news because they may calm farmers' fears about losses of agriculturally valuable species. Of course, it's not good news for the dogs.
而在貍貓的飲食中，家畜只占了一小部分。例如山羊，它在貍貓的飲食中僅占11%，盡管數量遠超過狗（兩者的比例為7:1）。這大概是因為家畜夜間被關入籠中的緣故吧。這些數據對農戶來說無疑是好消息，因為農戶可以不用過分擔心那些具有農業價值的物種會遭受損失。當然，這對狗來說卻不是什么好消息了。
