托业考试备考辅导资料精选阅读文章37
【Introduction】你养过猫吗？34%的美国人家里至少养了一只猫，并且这个数值还在增加。如果你想养猫，或者想知道更多关于养猫的妙计，这本新书不得不看：《Everything Your Cat Expects You to Know》。
【Section One】Article
What Your Cat Wants You to Know
Are you a cat person, or would you like to be one? Welcome to the club. Thirty-four percent of American households include at least one cat, which adds up to 90 million pet kitties owned in the U.S. If you're thinking about getting a cat — or want to know more about the one you've got — the new book The Cat Bible: Everything Your Cat Expects You to Know (Gotham) is an excellent place to start. Author Tracie Hotchner is one of the leading experts of the feline world. Her popular radio show, Cat Chat, which airs Wednesdays on Sirius radio, celebrates its first anniversary in November. TIME's Andrea Sachs (who has two cats herself) caught up with Hotchner between broadcasts in Vermont.
TIME: You write that you're against declawing.
Tracie Hotchner: Oh, violently. It is illegal everywhere in the civilized world except the United States. It is a barbaric practice, in which not just the claw is removed, but the entire first joint of the foot is removed with a garden clipper — they cut off the entire toe at the first joint. So you have animals that are butchered and experience extreme pain, and no longer have the use of their feet for all the things that cats use their feet for — exploring the world, jumping up and down, playing with things. If there are scratching issues, people have to be taught to have appropriate scratching posts in the right place, in the right way, for each individual cat. You learn how to clip the tip of the claw, which is very, very simple. It takes five or 10 seconds.
What about a cat that is very shy?
It's an uphill chore to socialize them, to get them to come into more relaxed contact with humans. They probably come from a feral cat background, and were not touched or socialized as babies. You're working against their genetic and early childhood experience. But you can get them out of it with an understanding of what makes a cat tick, which is not to go to them and not to try to urge, coax or demand anything of them. You have to let them come to you and ask for it. That of course takes a lot of patience and is just frustrating, depending upon your personality.
What about feeding your cat? In your book, you say dry food leaves cats dehydrated, causes obesity, makes them sick, and the like.
My big campaign is to get people off of dry food. The message of Cat Chat is: Think outside the bag. Dry food is kitty crack. It's addictive, and incredibly harmful to your cat. Of course, that goes counter to everything your vet tells you, and everything that advertising tells you. But when you start to feed cats wet food, their personalities will change, anywhere from 10% to 100%, toward affectionate and relaxed.
You recommend not leaving food out all day.
Cats are not a grazing animal. They're not a sheep; they're not a horse. They're an animal that should eat a mouse or two, then, if they're lucky, another mouse or two later, if it's a good day. But they can also go 24 hours without food. In reality, that would be just fine, but that's hard for us , because we like to think of them — and ourselves — having nice warm tummies. Two meals a day is really to suit the human experience.
You also warn about leaving cats alone too much. But people commonly think of them as solitary animals.
They do. And it has been very useful to accommodate human guilt and a human lifestyle to think, "Well, that's just a stationary object that can take care of itself." In fact, while they aren't a pack animal, they're very sociable. Cats who sit on the back of a couch and don't even look at you when you come into the room and stare out the window — what they really are is depressed and lonely, and they've learned how to survive in a highly understimulated environment. To me, that's not very kind.
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