Reflection 3
- As we near the end of the semester, reflect on your project for this course and discuss how your thinking has evolved over the semester on your:
- Topic area. How has your understanding of the topic evolved? What most surprised you as you dug into your topic area? Did your thinking about the topic area change over the semester? Give an example or two.
- Your perception of your writing ability. What did you discover about your talents as a writer in the discipline of biology?
- Suppose you had two minutes to give someone an “elevator talk” – a short, descriptive summary of what your project was about and what important lessons you learned from it. What would you say?
Not much has changed in my thinking in relation to the project, although I did veer from thinking of it as a full research paper to a primary source synthesis paper as it is more similar to such. As the semester progressed, I realized that I chose a very vague and broad topic which was one of the reasons why it was so difficult to narrow down which references to use. Focusing on specifics like nutritional value and two types of diets has allowed me to write more effectively. The most surprising thing that I found during my research was the fact that kibble as a concept was conceived so long ago in the 1860s.
I cannot claim to not have been biased in my thinking; of either of the diets I chose to study, I would have chosen kibble with supplementary additions rather than feed fully raw. The risks of just handling raw meat, especially in a household with a young child were not ideal and the food-borne diseases that just letting the dog lick you would risk was not worth it. My thinking was not necessarily disproved, but the benefits of the raw food diet have allowed me to view it in a more positive light.
In terms of my writing ability, I was not surprised in terms of tone and syntax, but I was able to more easily analyze figures, and use APA in-text citations and I feel that I can now more easily write a review paper.
Commercial dog food, or kibble, and the raw food diet are some of the most controversial dog food diets. Kibble is viewed as suspicious and is often high in carbohydrate content while raw dog food diets have bacterial contamination risks and risks of insufficient vitamins and nutrients. Raw food is often more easily digestible due to its unprocessed state, but raw food diets tend to introduce more foreign colonies of food-borne bacteria to the dog’s digestive system wreaking havoc on its gut microflora. In terms of nutritional value, it varies widely for both diets, but overall both diets would also need supplementary additions to complete a balanced diet. With enough precaution and work both diets can be tailored to suit different dog owners, but for a wide variety of people especially immunocompromised individuals and households with children, kibble would be best.