Retreat Your Self

*Find Richard!

This week started off pretty great, I participated on an on-campus experiment and made a pretty good amount of money. I then decided to treat myself to some Korean BBQ with the money I earned. I had a great time at some Circle K events throughout the week as well, but was most excited for the retreat at Lake Arrowhead on the weekend.

Before I was able to go on the retreat however, I had some major classwork to do. On Monday, instead of meeting in class, we met at the library, where a librarian introduced us to some of the library's research resources. This was actually really helpful, because I had not known about any of them before. There are a variety of tools and websites that I have access to as a student here at UCI. I can access basically any scholarly article needed for my research needs, which is just incredible. Also, I learned how to easily find these sources, which will come in handy later.

This week I read six TIME articles about Animal Minds, two in particular stood out to me. One of the articles was the one my group worked on, about cats and dogs, and why they think about humans differently. Really, the key idea was that cats are much less domesticated than dogs are. This explains why common house cats today look so similar to wild cats today. Cats also, cannot serve humans the way dogs do, so they are naturally less bred and domesticated. Another article that stood out to me was the article about animals and friendships. The story about Hare and Ellington was incredibly interesting, considering both chimps were from two different families, and this kind of relationship was so uncommon.

I am already pretty familiar with social media platforms, especially twitter. So far I only follow a few animal rights related twitters, like PETA and Animal Aid.