Citizen Science
“Citizen science projects actively involve citizens in scientific endeavour that generates new knowledge or understanding. Citizens may act as contributors, collaborators, or as project leader and have a meaningful role in the project.” - The first principle of the European Citizen Science Association
You might wonder, “am I the right person to do scientific research as somebody with no experience in the field?”. Maybe the most important thing in science is that the experts have great experience in their fields and have a meticulous process to review all their observations critically between peers, before anything gets published anywhere. And even then there is great emphasis on contextualizing their findings, always keeping in mind that there is only a certain percentage of accuracy as much as space for failure, to correct assumptions that are proven to be wrong.
All of these processes in science are great and also using the results of scientific research in the process of this game could be very helpful to complement the observations you make yourself. But there are also big problems in science, which might become apparent, when we look at the history of non-human animal studies.
TIMELINEBetween the 17th-19th century colonial exploration saw animals as resources and studied them to improve the production of meat, milk and labour, but also vivisecting them to understand human biology. Between the late 19th-mid 20th century behavioral researchers in laboratories isolated the animals violently to observe stimulus-response mechanics and ethnologists observed their instincts in the wild.
And only since the 1960s scientists in great ape studies started to find out about the cultures between other animals. On July 7, 2012 prominent scientists finally signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, affirming that animals have their individual agency and are sentient beings. Despite that declaration the largest part of research today is still about utilizing animals to study human diseases and medications, their productivity in agriculture, behavioral mechanisms and now also tools to modify genetic traits in animals.
What kind of powers do citizen scientists have?
For example animal testing laboratories believe that non-human animals are an appropriate subject matter to test medications on to research if they cure certain human diseases or are safe to use.
At the same time a great database of non-animal technologies has statistically proven to be vastly more accurate and helpful in testing medications.