How much pain do animals feel? This is a question which has caused endless controversy. Opponents of big game shooting, for exam

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问题     How much pain do animals feel? This is a question which has caused endless controversy. Opponents of big game shooting, for example, arouse our pity by describing the agonies of a badly-wounded beast that has crawled into a corner to die. In countries where the fox, the hare and the deer are hunted, animal-lovers paint harrowing pictures of the pursued animal suffering not only the physical distress of the chase but the mental anguish of anticipated death.
    The usual answer to these criticisms is that animals do not suffer in the same way, or to the same extent, as we do. Man was created with a delicate nervous system and has never lost his acute sensitiveness to pain; animals, on the other hand, had less sensitive systems to begin with and in the course of millions of years, have developed a capacity of ignoring injuries and disorders which human beings would find intolerable. For example, a dog will continue to play with a ball even after a serious injury to his foot; he may be unable to run without limping, but he will go on trying long after a human child who would have had to stop because of the pain. We are told, moreover, that even when animals appear to us to be suffering acutely, this is not so; what seems to us to be agonized contortions caused by pain are in fact no more than muscular contractions over which they have no control.
    These arguments are unsatisfactory because something about which we know a great deal is being compared with something we can only conjecture. We know what we feel; we have no means of knowing what animals feel. Some creatures with a less delicate nervous system than ours may be incapable of feeling pain to the same extent as we do: that as far as we are entitled to do, the most humane attitude, surely, is to assume that no animals are entirely exempt from physical pain and that we ought, therefore, wherever possible, to avoid causing suffering even to the least of them.
The author feels sure that______.

选项 A、animals don’t show suffering to us
B、dogs are more endurable than human children
C、we cannot know what animals feel
D、comparing animals with human beings is not appropriate

答案C

解析 根据第三段第二句可知,应选C。
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