TED 关于泰迪熊的奇怪故事

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How the teddy bear taught us compassion

TED简介：2014 生物 | 1902年，总统西奥多·罗斯福传奇性地给了一只黑熊一条生路 - 这促使了人们对一个叫做”泰迪熊“玩具的狂热。作家乔恩·莫阿拉姆深入讲述了这个故事，并让我们思考我们如何讲述关于野外动物的故事对一个种类的生存机会，以及整个自然世界会有怎样真正的影响。

演讲者：Jon Mooallem 乔恩·莫阿拉姆

片长：14：17

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=j01967hxkjm&width=500&height=375&auto=0

中英文对照翻译

So it was the fall of 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt needed a little break from the White House,so he took a train to Mississippi to do a little black bear hunting outside of a town called Smedes. 

1902年的秋天，西奥多·罗斯福总统需要一个暂别白宫的小假期，于是他坐火车去了密西西比。在一个镇外狩猎黑熊，这个镇叫斯密德思。

The first day of the hunt, they didn't see a single bear, so it was a big bummer for everyone, but the second day, the dogs cornered one after a really long chase, but by that point, the president had given up and gone back to camp for lunch, so his hunting guide cracked the animal on the top of the head with the butt of his rifle, and then tied it up to a tree and started tooting away on his bugle to call Roosevelt back so he could have the honor of shooting it. 

在打猎的第一天他们没有看到熊，大家都觉得很无奈。然而第二天，猎犬在很长的追逐后把一只熊逼进角落。但在那个时候，总统已经放弃了追逐并回到营帐吃午餐。于是他的狩猎指导敲昏了动物用他步枪的尾部去敲击熊头顶，然后把它绑在一棵树上，随后吹着号角，嘟嘟地走了，他想让罗斯福回来时享受射击的乐趣。

The bear was a female. It was dazed, injured, severely underweight, a little mangy-looking, and when Roosevelt saw this animal tied up to the tree, he just couldn't bring himself to fire at it. He felt like that would go against his code as a sportsman.

这是一只母熊，它有些迷糊，也受了伤，体重严重不足，看起来脏脏的；当罗斯福看到这个动物被绑在树上时，他实在不忍心朝它开枪，他觉得这样做会违反他的行为准则和运动员精神。

A few days later, the scene was memorialized in a political cartoon back in Washington. It was called "Drawing a Line in Mississippi," and it showed Roosevelt with his gun down and his arm out, sparing the bear's life, and the bear was sitting on its hind legs with these two big, frightened, wide eyes and little ears pricked up at the top of its head. 

几天后，这个情景被记录了下来出现在华盛顿的一个政治卡通中，它叫做《在密西西比划清底线》 画面展现了罗斯福放下了他的枪，同时伸出他的手臂，给熊留了一条生路。这只熊坐在它的后腿上，两只大眼睛睁得圆圆的充满了恐惧，它的耳朵竖在头顶上。

It looked really helpless, like you just wanted to sweep it up into your arms and reassure it. It wouldn't have looked familiar at the time, but if you go looking for the cartoon now, you recognize the animal right away: It's a teddy bear. And this is how the teddy bear was born. Essentially, toymakers took the bear from the cartoon, turned it into a plush toy, and then named itafter President Roosevelt — Teddy's bear.

它看起来很无助，你恨不得想把它拥入怀中让它不要担心。在那时它看起来不太眼熟但如果你现在看这个卡通你能马上认出这个动物：它就是泰迪熊。这就是泰迪熊诞生的故事，简单说：玩具制造商将这个卡通中的熊做成了毛绒玩具，并用罗斯福总统的名字给它命了名：泰迪熊。

And I do feel a little ridiculous that I'm up here on this stage and I'm choosing to use my time to tell you about a 100-year-old story about the invention of a squishy kid's toy, but I'd argue that the invention of the teddy bear, inside that story is a more important story, a story about how dramatically our ideasabout nature can change, and also about how, on the planet right now, the stories that we tell are dramatically changing nature.

我觉得自己有点傻，我站在这个舞台上并决定用我的时间来告诉你们一个一百年前的故事，关于一个软绵绵的儿童玩具的发明。但我想说在泰迪熊的发明的故事里，有个更重要的故事，这个故事关系到我们对自然的想法，可以如此戏剧化的变化。这也关系到此时在这个星球上我们所讲述的故事，正戏剧化地改变自然。

Because think about the teddy bear. For us, in retrospect, it feels like an obvious fit, because bears are so cute and cuddly, and who wouldn't want to give one to their kids to play with, but the truth is that in 1902, bears weren't cute and cuddly. I mean, they looked the same, but no one thought of them that way. In 1902, bears were monsters. Bears were something that frickin' terrified kids. 

您想想泰迪熊对于我们来说它像一个自然的产物，因为熊那么可爱让人忍不住想抱，谁不想自己的孩子跟其玩耍呢？而在1902年，熊并不那么可爱也不让人想拥抱，我是说他们看起来一样。可是当时没人这么看待他们。在1902年熊是野兽，熊当时是让孩子们异常害怕的动物。

For generations at that point, the bear had been a shorthand for all the danger that people were encountering on the frontier,and the federal government was actually systematically exterminating bears and lots of other predators too, like coyotes and wolves. These animals, they were being demonized. They were called murderersbecause they killed people's livestock. 

对几代人来说，熊一直象征着所有人们在前线遇到的危险。联邦政府其实曾经系统性地灭绝狗熊以及其它捕食动物，比如说小狼和野狼。这些动物当时被妖魔化，它们被称为杀人犯，因为它们杀害人们的家禽。

One government biologist, he explained this war on animals like the bear by saying that they no longer had a place in our advancing civilization, and so we were just clearing them out of the way. In one 10-year period, close to half a million wolves had been slaughtered.The grizzly would soon be wiped out from 95 percent of its original territory, and whereas once there had been 30 million bison moving across the plains, and you would have these stories of trains having to stopfor four or five hours so that these thick, living rivers of the animals could pour over the tracks, now, by 1902, there were maybe less than 100 left in the wild. 

一个政府生物学家解释说针对动物的战争，比如说熊，是因为在我们日益发展的文明中，它们不再有一席之地，所以我们将它们清除掉。在十年之间将近50万只狼被屠杀，在95％的原本属于灰熊的领地上，灰熊也濒临绝境。在那些曾经一时有3千万野牛穿越的平原上，你会听说这样的事儿：一些火车必须停靠四到五个小时才能让这群黑压压、活生生的动物如潮水一般穿过轨道。到1902年这里只剩下不到100只野牛存活于野外。

And so what I'm saying is, the teddy bear was borninto the middle of this great spasm of extermination, and you can see it as a sign that maybe some people deep down were starting to feel conflicted about all that killing. America still hated the bear and feared it, but all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a great big hug.

所以我想说的是泰迪熊诞生于一个异常严峻的灭绝时代，你可以把它看成一个征兆，也许有些人从心底开始对这些屠杀感到矛盾，美国始终痛恨熊也害怕它，但突然间美国也想要给熊一个大拥抱。

So this is something that I've been really curious about in the last few years. How do we imagine animals,how do we think and feel about them, and how do their reputations get written and then rewritten in our minds? We're here living in the eye of a great storm of extinction where half the species on the planetcould be gone by the end of the century, and so why is it that we come to care about some of those species and not others? 

这是我在过去几年来很好奇的事，我们如何想像动物、我们如何思考和感受它们，它们的名声如何形成，又是如何在我们的头脑里被改写。我们生活在一个灭绝风暴迫在眉睫的时代，这个星球上一半的生物种类都可能在这个世纪末消失，那么为什么我们会关心其中一部分种类而不是其它的呢？

Well, there's a new field, a relatively new field of social science that started looking at these questions and trying to unpack the powerful and sometimes pretty schizophrenic relationships that we have to animals, and I spent a lot of time looking through their academic journals,and all I can really say is that their findings are astonishingly wide-ranging. 

社会科学有一个新的领域，一个相对新的领域研究这些问题，同时尝试解析人类与动物之间具有神奇力量却也令人费解的这种关系。我花了很多时间来阅读他们的学术期刊，我能说的是他们的发现广泛得让人吃惊。

So some of my favorites include that the more television a person watches in Upstate New York, the more he or she is afraid of being attacked by a black bear. If you show a tiger to an American, they're much more likely to assume that it's female and not male. In a study where a fake snake and a fake turtle were put on the side of the road, drivers hit the snake much more often than the turtle, and about three percent of drivers who hit the fake animals seemed to do it on purpose. 

我最喜欢的一些发现包括一个人在纽约北部看越多的电视他或她就越害怕受到黑熊的攻击，如果你给一个美国人看一只老虎他们更可能假设它是母的，而不是公的；在一个研究中一条假的蛇和一只假的乌龟被放在路边，驾驶者撞击蛇的比例远大于乌龟，而在撞击假动物的驾驶者中有3% 是故意这么做的。

Women are more likely than men to get a "magical feeling" when they see dolphins in the surf. Sixty-eight percent of mothers with "high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem" identified with the dancing cats in a commercial for Purina. (Laughter) Americans consider lobsters more important than pigeons but also much, much stupider. Wild turkeys are seen as only slightly more dangerous than sea otters, and pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs.

相对于男人，女人更有可能在冲浪时看到海豚而有"美妙的感觉" 68％具有"强烈的权利和自尊感"的母亲们在观看Purina广告时[猫粮品牌] 能和跳舞的猫能产生同鸣（笑声） 美国人觉得龙虾比鸽子更重要，但也更加愚蠢。野生火鸡被认为比海獭更危险一点点，熊猫比瓢虫可爱两倍。

So some of this is physical, right? We tend to sympathize more with animals that look like us, and especially that resemble human babies, so with big, forward-facing eyes and circular faces, kind of a roly-poly posture. This is why, if you get a Christmas card from, like, your great aunt in Minnesota, there's usually a fuzzy penguin chick on it, and not something like a Glacier Bay wolf spider. But it's not all physical, right? 

这其中有些是因为外表的关系对吗？我们更同情看起来像我们的动物，尤其是那些像人类婴儿的大而朝前的眼睛、圆形脸，类似不倒翁的姿势，这就是为什么如果你收到你在明尼苏达州的姑姑寄来的圣诞卡，上面更可能有一只带绒毛的小企鹅，而不是冰川湾狼蜘蛛。但这也不完全是因为外表，对吧？

There's a cultural dimension to how we think about animals, and we're telling stories about these animals, and like all stories, they are shaped by the times and the places in which we're telling them. So think about that moment back in 1902 again where a ferocious bear became a teddy bear. What was the context? 

我们对动物的想法有文化的一面，我们讲述关于这些动物的故事，这些故事像所有故事一样，当我们讲故事的时候，用时间和地点给故事塑形。所以请想想那个时刻，回到1902年 一只凶猛的熊成为一只泰迪熊，当时是什么环境？

Well, America was urbanizing. For the first time, nearly a majority of people lived in cities, so there was a growing distance between us and nature. There was a safe space where we could reconsider the bear and romanticize it. Nature could only start to seem this pure and adorablebecause we didn't have to be afraid of it anymore. And you can see that cycle playing out again and again with all kinds of animals. It seems like we're always stuck between demonizing a species and wanting to wipe it out, and then when we get very close to doing that, empathizing with it as an underdogand wanting to show it compassion. So we exert our power, but then we're unsettled by how powerful we are.

美国正经历城市化历史上第一次大部分人住到了城市，我们与自然的距离日益剧增，我们有了一个安全的空间可以重新想象熊，并将其浪漫化。于是自然开始显得这么纯粹和可爱，因为我们不再害怕，你可以看到这个循环不断上演 一遍又一遍出现在所有动物身上。我们似乎总是这样妖魔化然后灭绝一个物种，而当我们快要成功时又开始怜惜弱者展现出无限的同情心。我们人类乐于运用自己的力量，却又为这能量之大而惶惶不安起来。

So for example, this is one of probably thousands of letters and drawings that kids sent to the Bush administration, begging it to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, and these were sent back in the mid-2000s, when awareness of climate change was suddenly surging. We kept seeing that image of a polar bear stranded on a little ice floe looking really morose. 

举个例子，这是几千封信件和图画之一。这是孩子们寄给布什政府请求政府遵循《濒危动物保护法案》 保护北极熊。这些信是在2000至2010年寄出的，当时我们对气候变化的关注剧增，我们一直看到这样一个画面：一只北极熊被困在一小块冰上，看起来非常惆怅。

I spent days looking through these files. I really love them. This one's my favorite. If you can see, it's a polar bear that's drowning and then it's also being eaten simultaneously by a lobster and a shark. This one came from a kid named Fritz,and he's actually got a solution to climate change. He's got it all worked out to an ethanol-based solution. He says, "I feel bad about the polar bears. I like polar bears. Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From Fritz." 

我花了很多天看这些文件，我非常喜欢它们，这张是我的最爱，您可以看到这是只被淹没的北极熊，与此同时它正被一只龙虾和鲨鱼吃掉。这个来自于叫一个叫弗利兹的孩子，他实际上已经找到对付气候变化方法，在乙醇的基础上他研究出了方案，他说 "我为北极熊感到难过，我喜欢北极熊，大家可以用玉米汁来开车——弗利兹" 

So 200 years ago, you would have Arctic explorers writing about polar bears leaping into their boats and trying to devour them, even if they lit the bear on fire, but these kids don't see the polar bear that way, and actually they don't even see the polar bear the way that I did back in the '80s. I mean, we thought of these animals as mysterious and terrifying lords of the Arctic. But look now how quickly that climate change has flipped the image of the animal in our minds. 

200年前，极地探险家会记载说北极熊跳到他们的船上尝试活吞他们，即使他们在熊身上点火。然而这些孩子们不这么看北极熊，实际上他们看待北极熊的角度也不同于我在80年代的看法。我们认为这些动物是北极神秘而恐怖的主人，然而你看现在气候快速地变化这已经颠倒了我们对动物的看法。

It's gone from that bloodthirsty man-killer to this delicate, drowning victim, and when you think about it, that's kind of the conclusion to the story that the teddy bear started telling back in 1902, because back then, America had more or less conquered its share of the continent. We were just getting around to polishing off these last wild predators. Now, society's reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world, and it's made even these, the most remote, the most powerful bears on the planet, seem like adorable and blameless victims.

它们从嗜血的杀人犯，变成了纤弱垂死的受害者、如果你仔细想想，这也算泰迪熊的故事的一个结论，因为在那时美国或多或少征服了属于它的领地，我们当时正接近消灭这些最后的野外捕食者。现在，社会的影响已经扩大 一路通往世界的最顶端，这使那些甚至最遥远、世界上最凶猛的熊看起来也像可爱的和无辜的受害者。

But you know, there's also a postscript to the teddy bear story that not a lot of people talk about. We're going to talk about it, because even though it didn't really take long after Roosevelt's hunt in 1902 for the toy to become a full-blown craze, most people figured it was a fad, it was a sort of silly political novelty item and it would go away once the president left office, and so by 1909, when Roosevelt's successor,William Howard Taft, was getting ready to be inaugurated, the toy industry was on the hunt for the next big thing. They didn't do too well.

其实泰迪熊故事还有一个不为人知的后记，我想讲给大家听，因为即使没有过多久，在1902年罗斯福打猎之后这个玩具成为完全的热潮，大多数人认为它只是一时流行，它只是一种无聊的政治新奇物品，在总统退职后就会消失。所以在1909年，当罗斯福的后任威廉·霍华德·塔夫脱准备任职，玩具界开始寻找下一个流行产品，他们没有成功。

That January, Taft was the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta, and for days in advance, the big news was the menu. They were going to be serving him a Southern specialty, a delicacy, really, called possum and taters. So you would have a whole opossum roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, and then sometimes they'd leave the big tail on it like a big, meaty noodle. The one brought to Taft's table weighed 18 pounds. 

在那年一月份，塔夫脱作为嘉宾参加在亚特兰大的一个舞会，在这之前的几天来最大的新闻就是菜单，他们打算为他准备一道特别而美味的南方菜肴，叫做红薯烤负鼠。一整只负鼠放在一堆红薯上烤，有时候他们会把大尾巴留在上面，就好像一根宽面条。放在塔夫特桌上的那只重达18磅。

So after dinner, the orchestra started to play, and the guests burst into song, and all of a sudden, Taft was surprised with the presentation of a gift from a group of local supporters, and this was a stuffed opossum toy, all beady-eyed and bald-eared, and it was a new product they were putting forwardto be the William Taft presidency's answer to Teddy Roosevelt's teddy bear. 

在晚宴结束后，乐团开始演奏，客人们开始唱歌，突然间塔夫特惊讶地收到一份礼物，来自于一群当地的支持者，那是一个填充的负鼠玩具，珠状眼睛和光秃秃的耳朵，这是他们推荐的新产品。作为威廉·塔夫特担任总统的答案呼应泰迪·罗斯福的泰迪熊。

They were calling it the "billy possum." Within 24 hours, the Georgia Billy Possum Company was up and running, brokering deals for these things nationwide, and the Los Angeles Times announced, very confidently, "The teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United Stateswill play with billy possum." So from that point, there was a fit of opossum fever. There were billy possum postcards, billy possum pins, billy possum pitchers for your cream at coffee time. There were smaller billy possums on a stick that kids could wave around like flags.

他们称它为"比利负鼠" 24小时之内，乔治比利负鼠公司成立并开始运营，在全国进行中介交易。当时洛杉矶时报非常自信地宣称 "泰迪熊 已经退到后幕，在将来的四年甚至八年，美国的儿童将和比利负鼠一起玩耍” 从那时起，负鼠的流行具备了条件。有比利负鼠名信片、比利负鼠顶针、比利负鼠奶油罐、喝咖啡的时候用。还有更小的比利负鼠攀在一根棍子上，小孩子们可以把它当旗子一样挥动。

But even with all this marketing, the life of the billy possum turned out to be just pathetically brief. The toy was an absolute flop, and it was almost completely forgotten by the end of the year, and what that means is that the billy possum didn't even make it to Christmastime, which when you think about it is a special sort of tragedy for a toy.

即使借助这些市场营销手段，比利负鼠的生命结果还是短暂得可怜。这个玩具彻底地失败了，到那年的年底，它几乎完全地被遗忘了。这意味着比利负鼠甚至没有持久到圣诞节，你可以想像这对一个玩具来说是个悲催的灾难。

So we can explain that failure two ways. The first, well, it's pretty obvious. I'm going to go ahead and say it out loud anyway: Opossums are hideous. (Laughter) But maybe more importantly is that the story of the billy possum was all wrong, especially compared to the backstory of the teddy bear. Think about it: for most of human's evolutionary history, what's made bears impressive to us has been their complete independence from us. It's that they live these parallel lives as menaces and competitors. 

对于这个失败我们有两种解释，第一，很明显我就明说吧：负鼠太狰狞了，但也许更重要的是比利负鼠的故事完全错了，尤其是比起泰迪熊的背景故事。大多数人类进化历史让我们觉得熊很厉害的是，他们完全独立于我们，他们过着与我们平行的生活，如同威胁和竞争者。

By the time Roosevelt went hunting in Mississippi, that stature was being crushed, and the animal that he had roped to a tree really was a symbol for all bears. Whether those animals lived or died now was entirely up to the compassion or the indifference of people. That said something really ominous about the future of bears,but it also said something very unsettling about who we'd become, if the survival of even an animal like that was up to us now. 

当罗斯福在密西西比打猎时这个印象完全被破灭了。那个被他绑在树上的动物，成为了所有熊的象征。这些动物现在是死是活完全取决于人们是给予同情心还是漠然无视。这预示了一种不详的熊的未来，它也预示了发展中的人类心中的不安。如果一个像熊那样的动物的生存现在完全取决于我们。

So now, a century later, if you're at all paying attention to what's happening in the environment, you feel that discomfort so much more intensely. We're living now in an age of what scientists have started to call "conservation reliance," and what that term means is that we've disruptedso much that nature can't possibly stand on its own anymore, and most endangered species are only going to survive if we stay out there in the landscape riggging the world around them in their favor. So we've gone hands-on and we can't ever take our hands off, and that's a hell of a lot of work. 

那现在，一个世纪以后如果你还关注环境的发展，你会感觉到更强烈的不适。我们住在一个这样的时代，科学家称之为“保护依赖” 这意味着我们已经过度的破坏了自然，它不能再单纯依靠自我修复了，大多数濒临灭绝的种类唯一能生存的条件是人类必须置身野外，监控着环境并把环境改造得利于动物的生存。我们必须亲自参与，我们永远不能放手不管，这个工作量太大了。

Right now, we're training condors not to perch on power lines. We teach whooping cranes to migrate south for the winter behind little ultra-light airplanes. We're out there feeding plague vaccine to ferrets. We monitor pygmy rabbits with drones. So we've gone from annihilating species to micromanaging the survival of a lot of species indefinitely, and which ones? Well, the ones that we've told compelling stories about, the ones we've decided ought to stick around. The line between conservation and domestication is blurred.

现在我们正在训练秃鹰不在电线上歇脚；我们开着小型的超光波飞机，领着鹤在冬季移居南方；我们给鼬注射瘟疫疫苗；我们用无人机器监视侏儒兔，我们从试图灭绝一些物种到无限期地微观地管理许多种类的生存。那么有哪些物种呢？那些我们已经说过的，在精彩的故事里出现的，那些我们决定应该继续存活的保护和驯化之间的界限变得模糊。

So what I've been saying is that the stories that we tell about wild animals are so subjective they can be irrational or romanticized or sensationalized. Sometimes they just have nothing to do with the facts. But in a world of conservation reliance, those stories have very real consequences, because now, how we feel about an animal affects its survival more than anything that you read about in ecology textbooks.Storytelling matters now. Emotion matters. Our imagination has become an ecological force. 

所以我一直在讲的是这些故事，这些关于野外动物的故事是很主观的。它们可能是非理性的、浪漫化的、或情绪化的，有时它们跟事实毫无相关。在一个“保护依赖”的世界，这些故事会有很真实的后果。因为现在，我们对一种动物的看法对它生存的影响大于你在生态课本中读到的任何信息。如今讲故事很关键情绪很重要，我们的想象已经成为一股生态力量。

And so maybe the teddy bear worked in part because the legend of Roosevelt and that bear in Mississippi was kind of like an allegory of this great responsibility that society was just beginning to face up to back then.It would be another 71 years before the Endangered Species Act was passed, but really, here's its whole ethos boiled down into something like a scene you'd see in a stained glass window. The bear is a helpless victim tied to a tree, and the president of the United States decided to show it some mercy.

也许泰迪熊营销的成功，一部分归功于这个罗斯福的传说和那只密西西比的熊就好像一个寓言。讲述了人类意识到自己对于社会的巨大责任的过程。那时还要71年《濒危动物保护法案通过》才会通过，但事实上，这是整个社会思潮浓缩成的一个景象，就像一副琉璃画，熊是个被绑在树上的无辜的受害者，而美国总统决定怜惜它。

Thank you. (Applause) [Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton]

谢谢 （掌声） [插画：温迪 马克诺顿]

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