Week 1: TIME Articles

Over the course of the first week, we practiced our annotation skills through the use of several short, but incredibly fascinating articles about animal behavior.

Out of all of them though, my favorite had to have been Jeffrey Kluger's, "Intelligence," a captivating look at just how smart some animals can be. Before reading, I had known about some ape species ability to communicate with humans through sign language, due to not being able to produce the same sounds for speech as we can. But "Intelligence" opened my eyes to the surprising amount of intellect present in many creatures on Earth.

A prime example of this was learning about Kanzi the Bonobo who was capable of combining words he had already known to describe and categorize things he didn't know the word for. An example of this I found particularly funny was his naming of kale as "slow lettuce," given that it took him longer to chew up kale than lettuce.