Barbara King Rhetorical Analysis

Barbara J. King introduces her argument with a very serious and riveting story about a mother dolphin in distress over the corpse of her baby and uses this anecdote to grab the audience’s attention, appeal to their pathos, and intrigue the audience to continue reading. Her argument is an ambiguous case because even though the two topics of animals and mourning over a loved one would each seem to be honorable, a large portion of the audience she is targeting either doesn’t know or have not formed an opinion with the subject that animals can mourn as well as humans, while others simply disagree with her. Therefore, she must have this kind of introduction to try and win the attention of her readers.
King uses the testimony of experienced researchers saying that they do not want to disturb the mother while she is in her grieving state to give her argument credibility. She enhances the ethos of those researchers by pointing out their thoughtful actions then uses that to her advantage in that they agree that the dolphin is indeed “mourning”. Her use of questions such as, “Was the dolphin mother truly grieving for her dead calf?” and “Why then did grief evolve in the first place?” serves to engage the reader and move the writing along in a more interesting way. In addition, she responds to those questions by saying that at one point she would have previously answered “no” to the question of if animals mourn, but now that she has done extensive research she discredits that idea by stating that to say it is “unscientific to project human emotions such as grief onto other animals” is incorrect because there are many scientific cases and facts that prove animals do grieve when someone close to them dies. King’s use of partition in the form of subtitles, and supplying a definition for what scientists classify as grief, credits her ethos in that she is showing the audience that she wants them to understand her argument and she is not trying to trick or deceive them. She presents famous case studies that appeal to the pathos of the reader. By showing them exactly what the research has shown in those studies, she is attempting to have the reader feel empathetic for the animals …show more content…
The repetition of stories about the death of babies, or other loved ones, and the disturbance it causes to the family will make every reader who is an animal lover cringe and emotionally connect to the story. The argument is constantly being supported by anecdotes and research statistics from multiple different resources, which in turn provides a wide variety of credible information. Then she ties it all back together by making direct comparisons to the way humans feel and react to loss and the key similarities in the way animals experience loss as …show more content…
She discuses the fact that when two animals are keenly attached but then separated, they might not be experiencing grief at all but rather a strong emotion due to their connection. This is conflicting with the whole argument that she has put forth thus far by saying that they are not actually experiencing grief just something similar. This part should have been left out in order to keep from supplying the opposition with more to strengthen their