If Animals Were Human :: Pets Love Family Essays

If Animals Were Human Going home on the weekends, automatically the family is happy you’re home, having been gone for so long. Mom is prepared to fix a hot, home cooked meal, dad has a project for you and him ready to go, and the sister is anxious to tell you about her life in high school and get her big sibling’s advice. The one who is often forgotten is the dog. The most faithful one, who is most anxious to see you, stands in the yard jumping up and down, barking, and running, starving for attention. He is forgotten in the sense that you notice him when he barks, when he nudges your hand to be pet, or doing something too distracting or agitating. Even then, he is let outside when he barks, he gets pet for a little while when he nudges your hand, only until you become bored with him, and when he becomes a distraction he is told to go away and lie down. When the dog experiences these things, the dog constructs feelings within him. Of course, the dog has feelings, but it’s never taken into consideration how deep they are. This notion is presented in the excerpt, â€Å"Am I Blue?† by Alice Walker. (Forest of Voices) In the beginning, she rents a house, which has neighbors within the view of her front windows. The neighbors have a beautiful horse in the meadow behind the house and Alice watches, during the day, this beautiful creature they call, Blue. She notices that the children there pay little attention to the horse, riding him hard for 15 minutes or so and then simply becoming bored and going back into their house to disappear for another month or so. Alice goes to see the horse and befriends it by feeding it apples. At first he liked the apples because it was a good treat while the grass was becoming dry because of the season. Then the horse came to expect the apples. Blue would wait by the fence, signaling by stomping or whinnying, for someone to come and give him an apple. All the while, when she was feeding Blue the apples she was befriending the horse. Not only did the horse like the apples, but also he liked the attention, which is sometimes hard to comprehend when you think of