Week 4: Twitter!

Another week, another round of Twitter posts! This week, we were tasked to follow ten more researchers and respond to five tweets. Most importantly, we were tasked with finding a research article to share on our own timeline and so I found this incredibly fascinating article, "Correlates of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)-Like Behavior in Domestic Dogs: First Results from a Questionnaire-Based Study." A very curious title, for sure.

But before I get to that, I should mention that today I responded to several Twitter posts, three about coyotes and two about foxes! I learned some pretty interesting tidbits and got to share my own personal experiences with coyotes to a classmate of mine, Derek Liu. He wrote about how coyotes are omnivores and, in urban areas, a lot of them make a living by foraging, oftentimes from trash cans. It made me think about this group of coyotes that would often jump a fence to get into my backyard. My mom would often bury food in the backyard for compost, but would find it dug up and gone by morning. I also followed ten more accounts this week, making sure to follow people most concerned with canine species, since that's what I've chosen as my field of study! I also found an interesting article from one of the researchers I found detailing how "pandemic puppies," that is, dogs raised during the COVID-19 lockdowns, have been experiencing behavioral issues, potentially resulting from those difficult times.

Going back to the article I wrote about for today's thread, I was first interested in the research both because of the novel idea of dogs exhibiting ADHD symptoms, something I once believed to only be observed in humans, but also because of the fact that the Akita Inu was placed under special observation throughout the study. Naturally, as an owner of an Akita Inu (see below) I was very very curious to learn whatever I could about her breed. By the end of the article, I found that despite Akita Inus being mostly regarded as cool, calm, and collected, they tend to be described as a lot more nervous by their own owners.