On Sheep Wolves And Sheepdogs Analysis

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My older sister, Jen, has always had a mild personality. Her shyness is not what makes her a sheep, though, as it is rather her perception of the world and everybody in that makes her fit into the sheep category. There are three types of people according to Dave Grossman’s On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs, and while I do not agree with Grossman that the world can be divided into three separate groups, the general basis of his idea is just. According to Grossman, you are a wolf that preys on the weak, a sheep that is weak, or a sheepdog that protects the sheep from the wolves. It is not to say that 100% of the time Jen is a sheep and doesn’t have the ability to be anything other than that, but for the most part, Jen is defined most accurately …show more content…
Jen has always done her very best to find the good in people. An example of her being overly forgiving is with one of her high school relationships. It has been a couple of years, and she has learned a lot from her experience with this certain ex-boyfriend, but even now she still gives him the benefit of the doubt. After dating for a couple of months, Jen and her boyfriend broke up and he started being a sleaze not long after. Despite knowing what he had been doing the short period of time that they were not together, she forgave him in took him back in a heartbeat. It was no surprise when he was caught being unfaithful not long after they began their relationship for a second time. Being forgiving is a good character trait to have, but in this case, it is clear that he did not deserve the grace that Jen put forth after their relationship had ended, and it ended up coming back to bite her. A sheepdog would have given little to no mercy to this wolf of an ex-boyfriend. This is the kind of situation that makes it easy to separate people into different boxes, because where the sheepdog would be fierce, the sheep would be overly sympathetic to a …show more content…
On Christmas this past year, Jen did this exact thing at a family gathering. Sitting around my grandmother 's dining room table, my aunts and a few other family members were drinking some wine after dinner. There is a tendency that when a certain two of my aunts get a little tipsy, they cross a line where they are not joking around anymore, but instead being downright rude as well as incredibly gossipy. When my mom decided to be a sheepdog and defend the people that my aunts were putting down, Jen let her sheep tendencies show and was the first to stand up and say that they were just “kidding around,” and that what they were doing was okay. The way someone handles a wolf’s inappropriate behavior is a fair way to tell what kind of character they are. In this instance, Jen had defended the wolves from being reprimanded for their poor conduct, proving once again that she is a

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