In Alice Walker’s essay Am I Blue? There is a horse named Blue that lives on a meadow with beautiful grass and plenty of acres to run around on but no one to keep him company or socialize with. The owners decided that they wanted to use him to impregnate another horse. They bring the horse to Blue’s meadow and let them get used to each other so they can make babies. As soon as the babies were born they took the other horse away from blue. Blue was used to the other horse and happy when she was around, but the owners just took her away from him when they were finished having the babies. Blue changed from this sad horse to a horse with “A look of independence, of self-possession, of inalienable horseness”. (632) Blue was happy that he had someone who he could relate with, meaning another horse who he could communicate and would do the same things that he did. But soon after the female horse was impregnated she was taken away from Blue and back home. Blue became more like a wild horse then the friendly one that he used to be. He lost all trust for people and put a barrier between humans and him.
In our society, the pace is so fast that everyone is trying to move forward and get ahead of one another that we tend to forget about the small things. Many people would argue that animals don’t have emotions, while others would argue differently, because when you step on your dogs’ tail he cries, because it hurts. When a person is in the kitchen cooking and drops a pot or something that will make a loud noise the pet will run, because he’s scared. Animals show emotions just like humans do such as Blue in Alice Walker’s Am I Blue? “Blue was like a crazed person. Blue was, to me, a crazed person. He galloped furiously, as if he were being ridden, around and around his five beautiful acres.” (633) When Blue’s owners removed his friend off his land he didn’t care about anything else. He had beautiful land, a nice apple tree, but no one to share it with. He had someone but they were taken away without any thought of how he would feel about that.
We should be more considerate of other beings. Sometimes people express how bad they feel when they see animals being beaten or suffering from the negative results for a chemical test. No progress comes from expressing our feelings about negative treatment, we have to be willing to act upon it and start with small things like not using animals for research for our own purposes. Mark Prigg noted that “MORE than 500 leading scientists and doctors have pledged their support for animal testing in medical research.” Scientist as well as doctors is trying to argue that it is alright to test animals because we need to make sure the products will not harm humans after being put on the market. If we are the ones who need to products we should be the ones that get the tests ran on us, not the animals.
Work Cited
Walker, Alice. “Am I Blue?” Issues Across the Disciplines. 8th ed.
Muller, Gilbert H. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. 630-633.
Prigg, Mark. “500 scientist back case for animal testing.” The Evening Standard (London) August. 2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd. Pg. 10 Aug. 2005. <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=f82aac894ada503e2e283e0f5bc03ff3&_docnum=23&wchp=dGLbVzb-zSkVA&_md5=072488f8e1232e5a224bb17acfa2f56>
