Questions, Questions, Questions

This entry is going to include a couple things. First of all, the questions I wrote as part of the “25 Question” assignment.  Then I discuss my Project Question, or in my case questions. And I will close with some thoughts on what we talked about in Friday’s small group class.

25 Questions – roughly. If I have learned the answer since I first thought of these questions, I included it in parentheses.

1.       What are the exact dates for the trip? (To be determined by the group)

2.       What is the food like? (Comparable to American food, at least you can find all the same foods there)

3.       What are the grocery stores like? (I saw a picture of the lovely Pic n’ Pay – looks like a grocery store!)

4.       Do people mostly speak English or Afrikaans or something else? Is it hard to understand people’s accents? (Mostly English?)

5.       Are white people the minority in East London?

6.       Will the zoo or lion park let me work with them and the animals?

7.       How do we contact people – like at the zoo or lion park?

8.       Can I be around animals enough to study some behavioral ecology?

9.       Can I handle the animals in any way?

10.   If so, can I do my own animal restraint course, like the one here at BYU?

11.   What do the conservation groups do in the community?

12.   If I worked with a conservation group, would I be doing desk work or presentations or researching things or out teaching people?

13.   Can I get out to the reserves that are around East London?

14.   Can I spend a significant amount of time on those reserves?

15.   How do I develop course contracts with upper level, more specific classes?

16.   Can I bring my lap top? (Yes – they have internet cafes and power converters)

17.   How would I get credit for an academic internship in South Africa?

18.   Can I split my time between a conservation group and the zoo/lion park?

19.   How could I be in a position to really observe animals?

20.   What scholarships are available for this kind of thing?

21.   Can I bring books and study from them and get credits for classes even if my project/research doesn’t deal directly with that subject?

22.   How will all of this (course contracts, main project) be graded?

23.   Will people be willing to take someone as inexperienced as me and train me to work with animals?

24.   Can I go do something on the animal rehabilitation farm that Heather mentioned?

25.   What other jobs are done at zoos – vet, cage cleaner, administration…who feeds the animals?

26.   Do they get more exercise/interaction than their cages might allow? Do they get the amount that they need? How much do they need?

27.   How do animals in the zoo compare to animals in the wild in health, behavior, happiness – can contentment be measured?

So, those are some of the questions I came up with when I first sat down to really think about this field study.

We are also supposed to post a Project Question. I do not have this question beautifully phrased in a way that encapsulates all that I would like to do, but I do have several questions that hopefully will merge into the greater Project Question. I know that I want to do something with animals and animal behavior. I am interested in learning how zoos work, clearly. I could research all the parts that go into making a zoo – the people that come to visit the animals, the animals, their interactions, the duties of the people working there, how a zoo is run and maintained and paid for, where the animals come from, their health etc. in relation to wild animals. 

For the last week or two I have been reading all about ethology, the study of animal behavior. This is something that has always fascinated me – goes back to the Jane Goodall method, where these amazing people live with and observe animals and figure out what makes them tick. We know that animals do not have emotions, or at least they do not have the capacity to realize they have emotions and then be driven by those emotions to do some action. I mean, a dog does not feel bad when the dog across the street does not want to play, causing our dog to go and mope in her dog house. But animals are motivated by something. They react certain ways to environmental or relationship cues – and that is what ethologists, if I can make that word up, are studying. Animals have hierarchies and orders, which is incredible to me. Think about wolves; there is an alpha male who is in charge of the pack. He has certain ways that he acts that show he is the dominant wolf. And the wolves in his pack act certain ways to show that they accept his leadership. Some human studied wolves and watched them long enough to figure out what some of these things are and what they mean to the wolves. I would love to be able to study some species and figure out why they do all the things they do.  Unfortunately, this might take more time and more resources than I have. Behavioral studies of wild animals require spending a lot of time out in the field. They can require some technology that I will not have available to me, like wildlife cameras, or radio telemetry collars. But I might be able to do some behavioral observation or captive animals, which means spending time in a zoo, or lion park. And I am quite fascinated by how zoos function. What kind of training do the employees have? Where do they get their animals? Do those animals reproduce much and do their offspring continue living in the zoo. I can think of a lot of questions about zoos, so it seems like that would be a good place to direct my project.

Friday’s class! Heather showed us some pictures of East London. We discussed some of the cultural differences between South Africa and the U.S. What I learned from this class: every day is going to require a lot more conscious thought towards how I act and treat those around me. I think it is important that we do not go to East London with naive assumptions. I mean, we saw the picture of all the school girls hugging Heather’s facilitator and of the cute kids from the day care sitting on her lap. So, people are friendly, not too worried about getting in your space. But then we talked about how if we want to go running, for exercise, that we should go in the middle of the day, don’t go alone, don’t go the same way every time, etc. What a contrast between the cute kids just loving you, and being worried that someone is going to track you down and do some unspeakable thing to you. And while it is not like it is drastically different, we can still go out and run, it will all just take a little more planning, a little more thought, care, common sense – whatever you want to call it.  

And that concludes tonight’s blog post – some general and project specific questions I had about the field study, what kind of project I could do, and some cultural things to remember when living in East London.