AP Draft Revision
For week 8, we wrote part of our draft for our AP project, identifying the problem we would be addressing in our essay. In class, we had a quick "speed dating" peer review day, where we would spend five minutes reading an essay and another few minutes to discuss areas of improvement or good points in the essay we read. All in all, many of the comments I received from my peers were similar to Dr. Haas' advice, where they suggested that I shorten my first graph and include a few more statistics, such as how many dogs are bred in puppy mills and how many are sold. I took their advice and included more numbers in my essay, as well as deleting the first figure in favor of simply summarizing the study instead.
For the introduction to my essay, I decided to appeal to the audience's sense of pathos in order to draw their attention and lead them into my AP topic and the review of literature. I believe I was successful in grabbing the audience's attention as I painted a shocking imagine.
From my HCP, I removed the sections discussing anthropomorphisms as well as the canine umwelt focusing on humans for survival rather than companionship, as I felt they were not as relevant to my AP as I had originally thought they would be; however, I was able to utilize the sections discussing the domestication of dogs as well as the sections discussing the primary and secondary emotional capabilities of canines, which I believed was teh strongest element of my literature review.
In terms of a philosophical or ethical question, I believe that from my review of the literature regarding canine cognition, cognitive ethology, and the history of canine domestication, I was able to argue that canine commercial breeding establishments, or puppy mills, unethically disregard the canine ability to feel emotions and our responsibility toward them per our shared history.
To frame the problem, I emphasized the emotional and cognitive abilities of dogs and how puppy mills completely disregard them to lower their costs and maximize their profits. I was able to find credible sources and statistics detailing studies on puppy mills via the Humane Society of the United States as well as scientific studies from various researchers on the canine psychology post-puppy mill in addition to the study of canine genetics and diseases. The study by Franklin McMillan, Deborah Duffy, and James Serpell focuses on the emotional effects CBEs have on ex-breeding dogs, emphasizing that the inhumane, highly stressful conditions these dogs are subjected to directly result in abnormal behavior once the dogs are rescued.
I believe my essay follows proper MLA formatting and citation where possible and that the tone and rhetoric of my essay was appropriate for a scholarly audience. I went back through my essay and adjusted the wording of a few sentences in order to adjust the flow and to reflect better grammar where necessary.
