Recently, an almost literal case of lifeboat ethics(伦理) occurred. On Aug. 4, Graham and Sheryl Anley, while boating off the coast of South Africa, hit a rock. As the boat threatened to sink the husband got off, but his wife was trapped in the boat. Instead of freeing his wife and getting her to shore, Graham grabbed Rosie, their pet dog. With Rosie safe and sound, Graham returned for Sheryl. All are doing fine. It's a great story, but it doesn't strike me as especially newsworthy. News is supposed to be about something fairly unique, and recent research suggests that, in the right circumstances, lots of people also would have grabbed their Rosie first. We have strange relationships with our pets. We lavish our pets with adoration and better health care than billions of people receive. We speak to pets with the same high-pitched voices that we use for babies. As an extreme example of our feelings about pets, the Nazis had strict laws that guaranteed the humane treatment of the pets of Jews being shipped to death camps. A recent paper by George Regents University demonstrates this human involvement with pets to an astonishing extent. Participants in the study were told a situation in which a bus is out of control, bearing down on a dog and a human. Which do you save? With responses from more than 500 people, the answer was that it depended: What kind of human and what kind of dog? Everyone would save a brother, grandparent or close friend rather than a strange dog. But when people considered their own dog versus people less connected with them—a distant cousin or a hometown stranger—votes in favor of saving the dog came rolling in. And an astonishing 40% of respondents, including 46% of women, voted to save their dog over a foreign tourist. What does a finding like this mean? First, that your odds aren't so good if you find yourself in another country with a bus bearing down on you and a cute dog. But it also points to something deeper: our unprecedented(史无前例的) attitude toward animals, which got its start with the birth of humane societies in the 19th century. We prison people who abuse animals, put ourselves in harm's way in boats between whales and whalers and show sympathy to Bambi and his mother. We can extend empathy to an animal and feel its pain like no other species. But let's not be too proud of ourselves. As this study and too much of our history show, we're pretty selective about how we extend our humaneness to other human beings. 小题1:What is the function of the first paragraph?
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