This is the last time, I promise

Well, it turns out that I need to pick a research question more precise than simply "How intelligent are animals?", primarily because it would be impossible to do a comprehensive analysis on the neurologies of every species in the animal kingdom. Just because one non-human animal displays sentience doesn't mean all of them do. So, after some pondering and some Wikipedia browsing, I decided on...

BostInno

Elephants!

Numerous studies show that elephants are among the most intelligent species on the planet. They pass the mirror test, a test for self-awareness that is also believed to correlate with empathy. They display altruistic behavior for other elephants (and sometimes humans as well). They appear to mourn their dead and even perform death rituals. There is lots of scholarly research on the topic. Seemingly, it is the perfect research question: "Do elephants have emotions?"

...Until I realized midway through my preliminary research that almost nobody disagreed with the fact that elephants had emotions. This surprised me greatly—in all my other studies, there were plenty who claimed that no animal could feel true, human-like emotions, and that those who claimed otherwise were guilty of anthropomorphism. However, I could not find a single instance of any expert singling out elephants as not having human-like emotions. That meant that I had nothing to argue against—I would be writing nothing more than an "info dump".

So, I once again changed my topic, this time to...

Graham Owen

Fish!

I'm not doing a broad "fish intelligence" or "fish emotions" paper; instead, I'll be writing about the possibility that fish feel pain. This is an important topic because it, more than anything, affects how humans interact with fish—most prominently, the way we fish. If impaling fish in the mouth and pulling them out of the water to suffocate becomes known to actually cause them pain, angling would definitely become a major moral problem. I will not be asking "Should angling be outlawed?" or making something similar my research question; my question will simply be "Do fish feel pain?" (From my research so far, it seems I can pretty much generalize this question across all fish species.) However, I will certainly mention the moral issues in the paper.

A good thing about this research is that it's very divisive—neurological experts disagree pretty evenly. I should note that unlike most of my previous research topic ideas, I have no initial opinion on the issue at the start—I don't know which side I'll ultimately argue for. This blog post is getting pretty long for me to go any further, but I'll discuss some of my findings in future blog posts.

Anthropomorphism

All right, so I'm studying animal intelligence; that's pretty much set in stone. "Animal intelligence" is a pretty broad topic by itself—probably too broad for this type of research paper—but also, I don't want to pick a topic so specific that it's not researchable. I'm basically just getting started, so we'll see how it goes.

Many biologists warn about the "dangers" of anthropomorphism—which, in a scientific context, is the tendency to assume that animals have similar emotions and motivations to what humans do, which, in many (if not most) cases, is a fallacy. However, some scientists see less of a problem with interpreting animal behavior in this way: in If Your Cat Could Talk, veterinarian Bruce Fogle argues that "both humans and cats have identical neurochemicals and regions in the brain responsible for emotion;" therefore, "it is not anthropomorphic to credit cats with emotions such as jealousy." Furthermore, in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin dismisses this "anthropocentrism" mindset with the assertion that the differences between animals and humans are "only in degree and not in kind."

I certainly don't know anything about the similarities between human neurochemicals and animal neurochemicals, and I'll definitely need to find more perspectives on this issue before I can take any sort of side in it.

That's all I've got for now. I'll record some possible research subtopics in the coming week.

I changed my mind again

All right, I'm kind of flip-flopping here. I'm back to my original "animal cognition" topic.

It's worth noting that a lot of these "ideas" I've been reporting on my blog posts are not mine, but are, in fact, the professor's. When I initially proposed the animal cognition topic, he made me aware that I phrased it too broadly and made the research look as though it would have been too reliant on philosophy. So, I switched to an "easy" topic (animal testing). But then, after my conference with her, she suggested I return to my original topic, with a few revisions.

I may still frame my argument within the context of animal testing, but it will probably be a smaller subsection of the research paper instead of the main argument. Previously, I was going to argue something along the lines of "If animals have cognition to this degree, then we should be treating them in this way..." but now I will be doing a more straightforward research paper on animal cognition and consciousness in general. Now that I think about it, a good spot to mention animal testing might be where I'll mention the pain experience in animals.

I've got my second research proposal due this Thursday, and next week is spring break. I'm pretty sure (or at least, I hope) that I'm not going to have a whole lot of homework over break, so this should give me plenty of time to do lots and lots of research. Hopefully I can work up the willpower to actually be productive over break.

All right, research time. Below, I'll be posting links to articles I find on the subject of animal testing, both scholarly and non-scholarly, accompanied by a short description, my feelings about the material, and how I may incorporate the article in my paper. By the time I'm done researching, I hope to have dug around enough to come up with a more specific topic.

• As before, Wikipedia is a starting point. The lead section on the "Animal testing" article neatly summarizes everything that comes after it and covers a lot of different points related to animal testing, including a few I hadn't considered. The article details some arguments for and against animal testing, but from an objective, neutral viewpoint. The article discusses the different applications of animal testing, the sources of animals used for testing, the euthanasia of lab animals, different ethical viewpoints, and general statistics. Although I may use some of the references the Wikipedia article provides, I will also be using Wikipedia in the early stages of my planning to get starting ideas of the different points to cover.
• Like Wikipedia, ProCon.org is another great place to get ideas about debatable topics. It also includes dozens of reliable sources, some of them scholarly, which I might make use of in my research paper. ProCon.org is a reputable non-profit organization that discusses common debates in today's society, and lists summaries of different arguments in a pro-con format. Its entry for "Animal Testing" includes 13–14 arguments on each side. Some of them are obvious and well-known (e.g., "Animal testing is cruel"), but others bring up things I never would have thought up myself (e.g., "Most experiments involving animals are flawed, wasting the lives of the animal subjects").
• When these two websites are insufficient, Google Scholar and the UB Libraries' Catalog will be my friends. I think I have a good understanding of the catalog from the in-class tutorial and from the Library Skills Workbook, and I've used Google Scholar on research papers before, and it's always worked.

At the moment, I'll assume I'll be doing a general research paper about animal testing. If, during my research, I feel like my topic could be narrower, I will make it so, but I think I'm good for now.