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ANS 420: Ethical Issues in Animal Agriculture

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Questions to guide your background literature search

What is the main idea?
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What do I need to learn more about?
What language or special terms do people use to describe this topic?
Do I know what all of this language means? (if no – look it up)
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Is there enough here for me to keep going?

Questions to guide your search for stakeholder perspectives

Who are the stakeholders? What organizations do they belong to?
What kind of arguments do they use?
What concerns do they have?
What evidence do they use to back up their arguments?
Have they used legal means to try to make changes?

Questions to ask about methods

What method do they describe?
How and where do they do the testing – in vivo/in vitro, observational, in a lab, in the field?
What are the research questions – what are they observing? E.g., behaviors, disease response, psycho-social, physiological
How many animals in the sample?

Questions to ask about data

What are they describing overall, is this a reasonable way to get at that information (e.g., anxiety based on maze strategies)?
How are they presenting the data?
Does this data make sense based on the methods used?
How does this specific information relate to your larger questions?