Whines and Pet Peeves

This week's Safina chapter that I chose to read was called "Whines and Pet Peeves". It discussed a series of topics from how human behvaiors have affected animal behvaior to self-recognition. I think the ideas that really stuck with me in this week's reading were how ducks don't seem to be afraid of dogs as much as they are of humans. This is mainly due to years and years of history of humans shooting birds for food or fun and they have now learned to fear this kind of behavior. What does that tell us about animals? It tells us that thye have now adapted to the new world and have learned a new instinct that they did not have before, indicating that they have some sort of memory capacity. Another thing in this reading that really made me stop and think is how an animal's minds may be superior to a human's. This is because the reading explored an instance of how animals only base their actions and thoughts on physical evidence, whereas, humans have the need to make things up in our minds in order to create some sort of logic (like religion). I never really thought of things in this way and that maybe a simpler mind is better than a mind that is based off of theories and the "what could be".

(ducks did not want to come too close to me and every time I tried to get closer, they would swim away)

This week also has me considering new research topics for the year. Last week, I didn't think of much for my research topic other than wanting to do it on maybe dog intelligence, but I feel like this week I am leaning towards a new topic which is elephants and intelligence or birds and their intelligence. This is mainly due to one of the McGraw Hill assignments that was about Asian elephants and their ability to problem solve and the recent bird documentary. It really taught me a lot about elephant's thought processes and the documentary proved everything that I thought about birds, wrong. I initially never gave much thought to birds and how smart they are because I mainly based that idea off of pigeons. I always had the thought that pigeons were not the smartest, and with that assumption, I thought it applied to all birds. However, the documetary proved me wrong and showed me all the endless possibilites birds have. My research topics also changed because I felt like I already had a good idea about how smart dogs were and I wanted to choose a new topic that I didn't know much about.

I think this week, I have more of an idea with how I would like to approach my research. I developed new techniques from the McGraw Hill assignment that had us research and read articles in a specific way. It had me approach the article by adding at least 2 annotations in each section and really analyze the exceprts that I was highlighting. This approach had me less overwhelmed by the text, whereas, I used to just read the whole article in one go without annotating. Whenever I read the text all in one go, I was not retaining any information and then I would have to go back, reread, and annotate all at once. By apporaching each section at a time and doing annotations as I go, I got the main idea of each section pretty quickly. A researcher that I learned a lot about was Beatrix Gardner who was a zoologist and psychologist who was the first to teach chimpanzees sign language. As I looked her name up in Google Scholar, I found several articles that were highly cited, which indicated to me that she is a trustworthy and credible researcher. She and her husband, Allen Gardner, both have a book together called Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees. I believe their work has revealed so much about the mind of animals and their ability to retain information to communicate. I think some keywords that will also be beneficial to my future research are "self-recognition" and "cognitive mechanisms". This is because they will be able to bring up a lot of sources about animals and how much of their surroundings they are aware of. Overall, my best source of information that I found this week was Twitter. I feel like yes, Twitter can be biased, but it is the place with the most updates on animal related issues and a wide variety of sources that you can go to on there. They are one large platform that provides a variety of accounts that focus on certain animal topics.