Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Self-reflection

This weblog activity does help a lot in pushing me to write my Research Paper. Without weblog, I think I will probably start everything three weeks before the rehearsal. Without weblog, I will not be able to get those useful suggestions given by my peers and of course, I will not know how their RPs are going on. It is nice to see my peers’ encouraging comments since preparing a RP is really a long and suffering period. I think my weblog performance is okay since I have tried all my best to catch up the schedule on time and then visit my peers’ weblogs to see whether I have some opinions for them. Among the five activities, I think I like activity 2 (First-hand data collection) the most. In that activity, I have posted my thinking of designing a questionnaire so as to collect my first-hand data. At first, I am very confused about what kind of questions I should include in the questionnaire, but then I still post a set of questions which I think may be helpful. At that time, I am very appreciated to have my peers remind me to ask something about animal euthanasia since this is the focus of my paper. Thanks to my peers to help in improving my RP.

It seems that I have never mentioned my motive in writing about “animal euthanasia”. Actually, the reason is that I am sure everyone must have read some news or articles about animals being mistreated. Because of human beings’ thoughtlessness, animals always become the victims. I personally feel pity for stray animals because they have no one to take care of while they still need to find ways to survive. Furthermore, stray animals have to tolerate of hunger, bad weathers and so on. Therefore, I really hate people who think it is not necessary to treat a stray animal as a life. I remembered that during this winter vacation, once I had visited a public animal shelter in Macau. When I was looking at the stray dogs there, I could see such a facial expressions that were helpless and confused. Somehow I felt extremely guilty because I wanted to help all of them, but the truth was that I did not have the ability to do so. Later on, I heard a girl next to me talking to a friendly stray dog, “don’t worry, your new owner will come and take care of you soon”. To be honest, my tears nearly came out at that moment. The cruel fact was that staring from the moment when the stray animals were caught, they would be given euthanasia after three days. In other words, the possibility for a stray dog to get a new owner is nearly zero. I think it is not fair for stray animals to be treated in this inhumane way. Young and healthy stray animals should not be given euthanasia. As a consequence, I have done a research to see if there is any other possible and more humane policy to treat stray animals. However, so far I am still worrying that my audience will not be convinced because euthanasia is absolutely the fastest way to reduce the huge number of stray animals in the society. I know that it is normal for people to pay particular attention on efficiency while some ethical problems will then be ignored.