Anthrozoology and Us
Anthrozoology and Us
Hello everyone! This week I have been super busy running around the NDSU campus for my first week of classes. In between all of the chaotic stressful mess that is this week I had been coordinating plans with another girl in my program to meet for the anthrozoology club I am vice president of. Today was finally met for the meeting and we got together to organize things for the involvement fair and the agriculture fair so we could get more people to join our club. This meeting made me think back to the anthrozoology class that I took last semester and why I enjoyed it so much. Anthrozoology if you are not familiar with the term is the study of the connection between humans and animals. Last year when I had taken Anthrozoology I remember one of the first topics we talked about was an article about a teacher feeding a puppy to a snapping turtle in front of his students. I know for me at least I had strong emotions towards this article at first being very upset as an animal lover. As my class discussed and read more of the details of the article my feelings did not change but I had a better understanding. As you read the article more closely the teacher describes the puppy as being very ill and not going to make it for long. The class also discussed how this is no different than feeding rats to snakes and talked about why waste food if it can help another animal but it feels different to us because we have a different emotional connection to these animals. This seemed to be a hot topic of anthrozoology that we rank animals as ones we love, ones we hate, and ones we eat. The topic of anthrozoology really intrigued me last year and eventually, I decided to join the campus club. Ever since I have had the opportunity to have people who train service dogs and different animals such as mini horses and birds come in and discuss their own human-animal connection. Each of us has our own thoughts on animals and it all comes together to make this anthrozoology study worthwhile. I am super excited about what the club has in store this semester and what other human-animal connections I can learn about.