Week 4: Research Articles

Hey! Welcome back to the blog! As I write this, I sit at my desk having been sick like a dog for the past 72 hours. It hasn't been a particularly ideal weekend, but, nevertheless, I found a couple of real interesting articles to talk about today! On my journey to find these articles, I looked up and down all of the outlets given. Since I'm a UCSB student, I was already familiar with accessing the UCSB Library Database so I began there. While racking my mind for ideas, I remembered the story of Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to ever be cloned and I wondered if the same thing had ever been done to dogs.

Dog cloning—no longer science fiction

Lee SH, Oh HJ, Kim MJ, et al. Dog cloning—no longer science fiction. Reprod Dom Anim. 2018;53(Suppl. 3):133–138. https://doi.org/10.1111/rda.13358

Lo and behold, I found out about the story of Snuppy the Dog. Not to be confused with Snoopy, Snuppy was named after the Seoul National University (SNU), where the research was conducted.

Once I had read the abstract, I knew immediately that this was the right article. The idea of cloning a dog has almost surely crossed the mind of anyone who's ever considered their own dog's terribly short lifespan (at least, when compared to ours.) Not only that, but the findings have far reaching scientific implications which could make for a fascinating scicomm article. Even more amazingly, this article also explores the cloning of a cloned animal using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), something I was never even aware was possible. I believe this study has the makings of an excellent scicomm article, with Snuppy and his later cloned iterations as the protagonists.

Investigating Empathy-Like Responding to Conspecifics’ Distress in Pet Dogs

Quervel-Chaumette M, Faerber V, Faragó T, Marshall-Pescini S, Range F (2016) Investigating Empathy-Like Responding to Conspecifics’ Distress in Pet Dogs. PLOS ONE 11(4): e0152920. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152920

As for the second article today, I decided to rely on luck of the draw, scrolling pages upon pages of articles, waiting for something to catch my eye. A few dozen pages later, I finally found this: A study done on emphatic behaviors observed in dogs. Particularly, they compared behaviors when a dog hears the whining of a familiar partner and when they hear the whine of another, unfamiliar dog. Incredibly, I learned that the researchers found that their "results are the first to suggest that dogs can experience and demonstrate 'empathic-like' responses to conspecifics’ distress-calls." I think this topic has great potential in a scicomm genre article after being inspired by Julia Espinosa's TED Talk "The Secret Life of Dogs." In it, she delves into the inner workings of dogs and how they perceive the world differently from us. Were I to write a scicomm article about this study, I'd do much the same things as her, attempting to frame these findings in a way that relates a dog's ability to empathize with our own ability to do so.