Analysis Of Marina Keegan's 'Why We Care About Whales'

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Have you seen beached whales? These massive creatures strand themselves on the beach, alone or in a group, the whims of the moon’s tidal forces. Sometimes, a single whale trapped by the moon’s pull calls in distress, drawing the sympathy of the whole pod, a case of symphony dooming the whole community stranded on the beach to a slow death. In “Why we care about whales”, Marina Keegan writes about witnessing fifty or so stranded pilot whales “lying along the stretch of beach in front of her house, surrounded by frenzied neighbors and animal activists” (35,36). Like the others, she jumped in to help—a futile task which finally led to “23 pairs of whale eyes glazed over” (32,33). Keegan suggests that despite the logic that human welfares are more important than animals’, emotions of compassion towards animals blind us from(better words) feeling the fragility of human suffering near or far away from us. She herself couldn’t think philosophically in the present of dying whales. The ambiguity of her thoughts reveals the paradox between logic and emotion. (unfinished) Human try to control all the things; however, there are …show more content…

In “Don’t anthropomorphize inky the octopus”, Jacob Brogan offer an answer to us—anthropomorphism. That is, human tend to interpret animals by “turning them into distorted mirrors of our own experience and expectation” (Don’t, 23,24). The escape of the octopus, Broman illustrates, is anthropomorphized by the human as “breaking out of animal aquarium”, “reminiscent of Finding Nemo”, “a magician like Houdini” for our own plights. We don’t want to know and care what exactly how octopus thinks and how he finds the way to escape; we focus on how to reflect our willingness on their behaviors. Instead of anthropomorphizing them in human terms, Brogan logically demonstrates, we should understand these creatures by their own cognition, their emotion, their complexity even if they are different than us in some

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