The Research Process

The historical conversations project is a momentous opportunity to further improve my research abilities and my ability to interpret scholarly opinions. For this, I will explore the topic of cognition in farm animals, particularly pigs, but I intend to encompass the intelligence of chickens, cows, sheep, and other animals associated with agricultural farms. The research examines the many abilities that farm animals display and go through certain trials and tests to determine whether their brains are on par with animals such as dogs and other companion animals.

The research I have conducted so far have included scientific journals and research from Elesvier and the Journal of Comparative Psychology. These sources provide extremely detailed and articulate science articles that describe the fascinating abilities that pigs and other farm animals display in these stressed environments. One article that provided particularly useful information was "Thinking Pigs" A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus domesticus". Quickly skim-reading the article enlightened me about how pigs mirrored the abilities of dogs in terms of object discrimination. Their capabilities proved to be even more advanced than their canine counterparts as they could understand complex phrases and commands that may be to sophisticated for even the brightest of the dog species.

Of course, cognitive abilities are not only measured by how well one can understand verbal commands but the ability to express emotion because it shows that you are conscious of the things around you and how you respond to that situation is an indication of your cognitive abilities. In other words, your emotions and define just that. Another specific research article that I looked at to explore this topic is "Measuring Emotional Processes in Animals: The Utility of a Cognitive Approach." It first looks at the emotional responses that humans have and found that the chemical changes in the brain also matched that of animals, more closely in primates, but overall demonstrates that animals with a similar structure to humans do experience emotions and can show distress, joy, and longing.

These particular articles have been the among the best I have found this week because not only did they provide an extensive overview of what I have been looking for but also links to other articles related about the same topic but in a different perspective because of different experiments that were conducted.

One important researcher in this field of study is Christian Nawroth. He works at the Queen Mary University of London as the animal cognition researcher who studies farm animal's cognitive abilities in the attempt to better their treatment and overall health. Another leading researcher is Mike Mendl, who is a professor at the University of Bristol, where he is a Professor of Animal Behavior and Welfare. He explored a new way to express animal emotion through "cognitive bias" which has changed the way the industry has treated farm animals and improved their overall welfare.

While researching articles for the HCP, there were keywords that worked effectively and ineffectively. Some words that did not prove very helpful were simply "animal intelligence" because those words drew in a myriad number of articles that were slightly or unrelated to the topic I had in mind. I wanted a narrower search, and so I put in more important keywords such "farm animal cognition" and "farm animal emotion" because these words brought me to specific articles that helped me find exactly the type of experiments and research I was looking for.

Most of the research I have conducted so far has been entirely through the Internet. I used credible websites such as nature.com and used Google Scholar to find the most profesional resources as possible. Although I have not used the UCI library, I used the VPN services in order to access articles I would otherwise have to pay for in order to read them. This helped me discern whether or not I should keep the article for further analysis or discard them.