Don't Slow Down

I can't believe I am more than halfway done with Spring Quarter and can soon experience Summer Vacation. However, I must not let the amazing feeling of relaxation and the beach get in my head and instead continue to work hard in my courses.

This week on Twitter I specifically followed accounts that highlight dog science and discuss the many intelligent characteristics and qualities dogs possess. After searching long and hard for new accounts, the most interesting one I followed was @OHAIRElab. This Twitter account is run by Dr. Maggie O'Haire and is an organization that focuses on Human-Animal Interaction Research and Education. There were many studies and information tweeted that illustrates how humans and dogs communicate and understand each other's forms of expression. Furthermore, the most interesting tweet I saw was actually by a classmate, Marina. She explained that dogs can attempt to show dominance not only towards other dogs, but towards humans as well. For instance, a dog pulling on a leash can be considered to be an act of dominance, which is something I never knew. My dogs do that all the time, but now I feel like I need to teach them not to pull on the leash and walk beside me. I even tried something completely new this week. I went hashtag surfing and found some hashtags that were very useful in terms of dog science. Specifically, a few hashtags that were most effective were #dogintelligence, #dogemotion, #dogcommunication, #dogbehavior, and #dogcognition. I did not come up with all these hashtags by myself. I learned that I can use one hashtag to discover another if they are somewhat correlated. This also helped me come across new accounts that tweeted using one of the hashtags I searched. Overall, this experience was helpful and I plan on using it next time to find more accounts about dog science.

In addition, I commented on Kailea's Research Agenda Page. As a whole, it was very appealing and inviting to read. Her layout and design of the page was very organized and spaced, which caused her annotations to stand out. This great organizational style allowed me to distinguish the three studies and their annotations from one another. Moreover, I gave her advice about making sure her sources were connected since they seemed to discuss two different animals. She also did not include summaries of the studys’ results, so I suggested that she should consider including that in her annotations. Once she includes the results, I believe her annotations will become less vague and instead be filled with strong details. Her page and research has great potential and I am interested in discovering what she does next.

I believe this was my best tweet of the week because it not only shows that dogs understand human emotions, but that they also respond in a way that is affected by a human's expressions. If a dog senses that their owner is angry for instance, their heart rate may increase as they wonder why their owner is mad. This example of dogs experiencing stress could be because their instinct makes them uneasy when they see bared teeth. Therefore, I included this in my blog because I want people to know that dogs truly are intelligent animals, especially when it comes to understanding emotion and communication. A link is provided in the tweet as well if students would like to learn more about this aspect.