Domestication Project
In the Domestication Project, I learned what Mitosis and Meiosis is, what the difference between Genotype and Phenotype is, and the causes behind dog abuse. My biggest take-away from this project is the importance of citing sources.
Citing sources is important because you can find your information later and because when you are presenting information to people it is important that your audience can verify your research. I learned this because when I was showing my infographic to a teacher, they didn’t believe my information because I didn’t have a source. They questioned the information on my infographic and told me to go find my source. So when I went to go find my source I couldn’t do it. I had to go search the internet to find my information about my source. We Googled “dog abuse” and found a source that couldn’t be verified and wasn’t a quality source. After that, I looked through my emails and tried to find my source in there, but I couldn’t find it. I looked through my emails and my infographic, but couldn’t find anything. I Googled “dog abuse in the US”, I found a source that had good information and that could be verified. I cited it using Easy Bib, and included the citation on my infographic so that anyone who reads it will see that I did good research. This experience has taught me to cite my sources so that I can find them easier and also so that my evidence can be supported. For this project, I wanted to do what are the different signals do service dogs give their owners when something is wrong, but I was not able to get that much evidence to back up my claim. So a week before the exhibition came around I was thinking that I could choose in issue to put a stop to, so I came up with the idea of dog abuse. I remember I wrote a paper when I was in 8th grade about dog abuse and I wanted to continue with that. After all of that mess I had a week to come up with an infographic to make and how to come up with all the information I needed. I studied dog abuse for my project because I think that ending it is very important. Dog abuse is very common in a lot of states. According to the Humane Society of America, animal abuse “crosses all social and economic boundaries.” In fact, I learned that animal abuse is often correlated to other violent crimes. Stopping animal abuse is a difficult task. Animal abuse often happens in houses behind closed doors and it can be difficult to catch an abuser in the act. One of the areas that could have been improved in this project is that I could have actually created a test to discover how often animal abuse occurs. However, because I was unable to decide on a topic until very late in the project, Summer told me that I should just find information of the rates of dog abuse in the United States. According to the Humane Society of America, there are 1,423 cruelty cases of reported pet abuse and 70% of those cases are dogs. This project had taught me how prevalent animal abuse is in America and I learned how important it is to cite a source and find good information. |