"Can you feed your dog cranberry sauce?" a coworker asked me. Oddly, since he doesn't have a dog.
"Do you want me to look that up?" I said.
"Did you work in a library?" he said.
I laughed, said I had worked in libraries, pulled out my phone and looked up his question.
Cranberries are not poisonous to dogs, I told him, but most dogs probably don't want to eat them anyway.
"How do you know that's true?" my coworker said. "How do you know how whoever wrote that knows that?"
What a fun question!
"You can check the sources, see where they got the info," I said.
I showed him the article on my phone, and he watched as I went back several links to a professional Veterinarian site. On it, I clicked on one vet, randomly.
Her page had a phone number.
"We could call her," I said, and he laughed.
Now I wish we had called and asked about dogs and cranberries, just for fun.
"You can always check your sources," I said. "Or try to. If it's only one guy on Facebook saying his cousin said something, that's not good enough.
But at some point, you have to trust other people, that not everyone is lying."
He was really interested, but he showed me his phone--just a flip phone. Like many of my colleagues at the thrift store, he never uses the Internet.
It's a problem--how to think critically when you don't have access to information?
But I know plenty of highly educated people who use the Internet but who don't think critically, so it's not that simple.
Thinking critically is not about access to information, it's about asking questions.
P.S. Cranberries are okay for dogs––grapes & raisins are not!
"Grapes and raisins are known to be highly toxic to dogs,
though research has yet to pinpoint exactly which substance in the
fruit causes this reaction. Because of that, peeled or seedless grapes
should also be avoided."
Via AKC
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"Wikipedian Protester", by xkcd [CITATION NEEDED]
