Alice Walker's "Am I Blue"

Alice Walker's essay Am I Blue?, is on the surface, a statement about how humans treat animals and the right's of animals. However, on a deeper level, Walker is making a very powerful argument about how human animals treat each other much the same way they treat non human animals.
All though history, horses have been symbols of power and grace. Gigantic herds of mustangs were once seen galloping on the American frontier. Alice Walker brings you to her reality, with the story of a beautiful horse named Blue. She uses great imagery, personification and socially thought provoking analogies to build emotional sentiment for her central ideas and effectively persuade you to see her point of view. She incorporates her techniques so well that the reader is left with an entirely new, or at the very least, greatly supported view of a horse’s life and animal captivity.
Alice Walker's extraordinary use of imagery effectively creates scenes of beautiful country life in the readers mind. A reader can brilliantly picture "a large meadow" running strait from a porch "into the mountains." Her Descriptions of Blue "flipping its mane," added with the scenery of the five acres, develops a full scene that one can truly observe and feel. This technique of imagery not only captures the reader’s attention, but gives the reader a firsthand view from the eyes of the writer. This leads to a greater effect when Alice surfaces arguments from her experience. Alice's great use of imagery helps to enhance all aspects of her story.
This story of the solitary misery of a neighbor’s horse evokes so much empathy in Alice Walker that she quits eating meat. "Am I Blue" is about a fond relationship between a horse and a woman. However, one may wonder if there is much more to the story than what the words say. In "Am I Blue," Alice Walker conveys her high regard towards animal rights through the use of many different rhetorical devices such as description, anecdote, metaphor, personification, irony,