Spreading My Wings

Each week I am exposed to a new world on Twitter. Last week it was the world of dogs and this week it is the world of all animals big and small. There is so much I have not been exposed to previously, but I am glad I have finally gotten the chance to dig deeper into the subject of animal science on Twitter.

As previously stated, I focused my Twitter experience this week on animals as a whole and found a variety of accounts. This is because I wanted to learn how other animals communicate, act, feel, and display intelligence compared to dogs. As a result, I noted some similarities and differences. For instance, dolphins are able to communicate using

echolocation whereas dogs mainly communicate by using scent and body language. Moreover, wolves, like dogs, have an extremely strong sense of smell, which makes sense since dogs were originally wolves before they became domesticated.

In addition, two accounts that were good finds were @mostlyotters and @AnimalPlanet. John Moncrieff runs @mostlyotters and is a wildlife photographer who discusses otters' abilities. The account @AnimalPlanet illustrates multiple animal's characteristics as well as calls for action when animals are in danger or treated poorly. One aspect I found very interesting was that pigs are very smart animals, maybe even smarter than dogs and 3-year-old children, and are naturally hygienic. Another piece of information I learned about that I would like everyone to know is that although chickens are often believed to be dumb animals, they actually demonstrate thinking skills very similar to mammals and primates. Both of these facts I learned on Twitter were new pieces of information that were able to change my beliefs about chickens, pigs, and other animals. I notice how every species is intelligent in their own, unique way. I hope information about animal science, like the ones I included, will be able to change other people’s beliefs as well.

Once again, I had to respond to three of my classmates' blogs and explain to them what I thought worked really well and what aspect could maybe be enhanced to improve a reader’s understanding. This week, I responded to Yijing, Bayan, and Mariela. After reviewing my responses, I found my best response was for Bayan because I believe I gave reasonable and great advice for her to possibly improve her research process or blog posts. For instance, she mainly wrote about bird intelligence, but did not provide any examples. Therefore, I said that next time she could summarize what exactly birds did to prove their ability to communicate with complex vocabulary and what specific strategies birds used to solve puzzles. I hope my comment was insightful and gave her some tools that she can use to enhance her writing. Despite this, her blog post was well organized and contained a lot of amazing information about animal science.