2 . Five years ago, I was a trail ride leader at a holiday farm in Victoria. My favourite horse was a warmblooded called Holly, a chestnut mare. Aged seven, she was _________, sweet-natured and well-trained; the only _________with Holly was her vivid imagination. I was constantly surprised by Holly’ s ability to be_________ by rabbits, the wind or even shadows - sometimes her own shadow!

One day, as we headed back from a ride on the beach, Holly and I were_________the way over the hilly area. When we got to one particularly long, steep hill, Holly began to twitch (抽动) her ears and step in place. So, when she_________ to sniff(嗅) and give all the _________that she believed the ‘horse-eating monsters’ were close, I became a little worried.

At the bottom of the hill as we rounded a corner, Holly_________with caution, and so I followed her gaze to the path ahead. There, sunning itself in the middle of the track, was a brown_________. This time it was my _________to get scared; I was on a nervous horse, leading a group of eight inexperienced pre-teen riders. Unexpectedly, Holly was firmly__________, ears forward. With the snake in her sight, she was no longer worried.

I have heard that horses have a better sense of__________ than dogs. I hadn't seen it __________ before that moment.__________, while we waited in reality for just a second or two - but for what felt like a century - the snake awoke and glided calmly off into the bush.

Holly then__________, leading the horses with caution and care. She had been alert to danger and had been __________for the safety of us all. Following in the footsteps or their lead mare, not one of the other horses showed any fear.

Grand adventures start with simple resolutions. And so it     1     (happen) one day that Melanie Vogel decided to walk alone from one end of Canada to     2    other.

She’d read about the Trans Canada Trail, the longest recreational trail network in the world, in a magazine in the public library. She felt restless in Toronto, a big city     3    the concrete ground didn’t breathe, the buildings closed in on her, and everyone was so very, very busy.

On June 2, 2017, she took her first official step in the fog at Cape Spear, the most easterly point in Newfoundland. If she made it to Victoria,     4     (follow) the northern route, she would become the first woman     5    (hike) the Trans Canada Trail to all three oceans.

The trail is not all easy walks through smooth, wooded paths. Ms. Vogel hiked     6    forests, wheat fields, scorching sun, snow and hailstorms. She hiked along the Trans-Canada Highway around Lake Superior, up to Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories, and over the Rocky Mountains. She encountered the best kind of people, and the     7     (bad) kind of man, and the latter frightened her more than the    8    (wolf). She     9    (trap) in the Yukon by a pandemic lockdown.     10     by then she was no longer alone; she had fallen, unexpectedly, in love!

7 . Back in November 2019, Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer working at the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project in Loango National Park, Gabon, West Africa, saw something she couldn’t quite believe — one of the apes named Suzee noticed her son Sia had hurt his foot. After seemingly thinking about the best course of action, she then plucked an insect out of the air, licked it and applied it to the wound.

Mascaro captured the whole touching moment on film and showed her tutor, Dr. Tobias Deschner, a zoologist working for Ozouga. The Ozouga team then set about monitoring the chimpanzees in the park and looking for other examples of the behaviour. Over the following 15 months they captured 76 incidences of the apes applying insects to wounds on themselves or other group members. The researchers are uncertain why the chimps use the insects, or even which insects they are, but suspect they might have lenitive properties that could provide pain relief.

However, the finding really proves that the act of applying an insect to treat other’s wounds is a clear example of prosocial behaviour (亲社会行为) that echoes the acts of empathy displayed by human beings. “This is, for me, especially breathtaking because so many people doubt prosocial abilities in other animals. Suddenly we have a species where we really see individuals caring for others,” Deschner said.

The team now aims to identify the insects being used by the chimpanzees and investigate who is applying insects to whom to establish whether the behaviour is based on a social rank. “We need to still put much more effort into studying great apes because it is crucial to shed light on our own cognitive evolution,” said Deschner.

The first domestic chickens we have found lived no earlier than 3,670 years ago, suggesting they have a far shorter history than we thought. These birds don’t seem to have been raised for their meat,     1     (make) it unclear what drove domestication. The chickens alive today descend from a wild bird native to South-East Asia     2     (call) the red jungle fowl, but exactly     3     domestication occurred was unclear. Some researchers have estimated that the first domestic chicken lived more than 6000 years ago, while others claim     4     (find) chicken bones at 10,000-year-old sites.     5     analysis by Ophelie Lebrasseur at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France and her team concludes that the     6     (early) clear evidence of domestic chickens appeared between 1,650 BC and 1,250 BC at a site called Ban Non Wat in central Thailand. Not only     7     (be) chicken bones superabundant at the site, but there are signs that people were buried with the birds,     8     Lebrasseur says makes a domestic relationship clear. Lebrasseur and her team suspect chicken domestication might have been triggered by the       9     (appear) of cereal fanning in South-East Asia. “This created a more open, less tree-covered environment, which is actually an environment where red jungle fowl thrive,” she says, “And they could have fed     10     the waste from human societies.”

9 . Before you worry about bacon and how much it may cost when new animal welfare laws go into effect next year, let’s talk about the pigs that gave their lives for it.

California has been on the forefront of protecting animals who live short lives on factory farms either to produce food for us or to be slaughtered and sold as food. The latest advance came in November 2018, when 62.7% of the state’s voters supported Proposition 12, the Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act. The law began going into effect last year, requiring hens and veal calves to be given more space to live in. Starting on Jan. 1st, the law will require that all eggs sold in California come from cage-free hens and that pork sold in the state come from breeding pigs that are not held in cages. These are humane steps designed to lift these animals out of structures that barely allow them to move.

Pork producers have had the longest time to comply (遵守). Some big companies like Hormel Foods have pledged to do so fully, but others have spent the last few years fighting the law rather than figuring out how to put it into practice. They say that the law will significantly raise the price of pork and that it violates the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress sole power over interstate business activity. So far, that fight has been a waste of time that pork producers could have better spent figuring out how to retrofit (翻新)their farms.

They also complain that the regulations on the law are not set. But the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which has yet to finalize the regulations, says that the delay should not have prevented producers from retrofitting their housing for breeding pigs. The agency has publicly posted draft regulations, which mostly concern record-keeping, certification and definitions of terms.

For fans of bacon and other pork, any rise in cost is the price of not having a pig suffer before it’s killed for food. It’s a price the animals shouldn’t have to pay.