Analysis Of Edward Hoagland's The Courage Of Turtles

We have many essayists and novelist today, one of the best is Edward Hoagland. He has written many nonfiction essays and books. In his essay ‘The Courage of Turtles,’ he talks about a younger him who seemed like an animal activist wanting to help rescue exclusive animals, not just turtles. All animals live off of gumption, searching, storing, gathering, and collecting anything they can do to keep living. Hoagland explains how his love for animals began, and how he even made mistakes in trying to help the animals he loved so much. Many animal activists preach about saving nature, yet when it comes down to it, they aren’t helping they are in fact hurting nature. In his essay, Hoagland has incurred a lot of pathos or emotional appeal to the reader. “They’re as decorative as pansy petals, but they are also self-directed building blocks, propping themselves on one another in different arrangements, before up ending the tower.” (Hoagland pg.152, para.8) This …show more content…
However, taking the animal back to their house and doing what they think is best is not always the case. Animals much like children do not come with a ‘How To’ book, yes you can turn to the internet for help but not everything the internet says is true. You can look up different things and all of those things could just might be the wrong thing. After the activist realizes their mistakes they could go try to help by sending it back to the wild. Hoagland did just this with one of his turtles, he sent it to the wrong body of water and ultimately sent his turtle to its death. All animals live by through gumption it has been like that for many hundreds of years. Human interference with the wild should be absolute to a minimum. Sure helping an animal out is great but if you weren’t a trained professional who studied in that particular field or have past knowledge about it you should not go and try to