Week 1 Blog: Learning about animals / info about me

Sipping on some coffee outside of a coffee shop in San Francisco, CA.

Hi, My name is Jerrod Reboredo i'm from Pleasant Hill, California but i'm currently living in Santa Cruz, California. Im studying Global Economics at the University of California - Santa Cruz.

COVID has affected me like everybody else, it is such a strange time where we now walk outside or go to a store and see many people wearing masks and being very cautious about being near other people. For me this year, almost all of my classes have been taught remotely which I have found to given me a feeling of agency and responsibility to get my work done but on my own terms. I do feel that my experience taking many remote courses has negatively been affecting my and many of our social needs as humans when learning is being taught in such a non interactive way.

As far as my skills for writing and research I have some experience in an academic setting with these topics. I would equally rate my skills in these as pretty good but can use some work. What I am most excited and interested in, is to build on my research skills during this course. Already, though doing the annotation summary assignments I have shown the basics of research by finding out more information on academic researchers and their studies ,which I had never previously done before. I have found that finding these researchers are easily accessible on University websites and similar domains. My problem areas with writing specifically is that I have found to not outline my work as well as I could. But, I think this skill will definitely improve as I further my practice in annotating articles.

Two topics from the articles that I found most interesting is the topics covering "mourning" and "animal consciousness". I connected with the article about mourning because I thought it was interesting to hear that other animals mourn their dead with similar emotions as humans do. These animals experience grief, suffering, and the loss of hope all puts into perspective how similar species are in their experience of life. The second article that I found interesting was when talking about intelligence. A form of intelligence is being conscious, being able to speak and process language, and recognize patterns. The Bioethicist, Peter Singer, really caught my attention in this article because he pondered philosophical questions about morality in killing and digesting animals if they are conscious being. This really made me question how humans think of certain animals as unimportant and therefore show little care to acknowledge these animals consciousness when we kill or even eat them.