Dead Armadillos

A brave, tough, and a self-confident woman, that is who Gail White is. White claims to be a critic of the world around her and she expresses this through her poetry. In her poem “Dead Armadillos,” she points out the way the society looks at animals and how they give importance to them. Gail White was able to bring attention to the status of animals in the wild by using armadillos as a representation of them, and telling how the majority of the society gives little importance to them by using similes and giving the poem a sarcastic tone. White used similes to compare armadillos to a “blind knight” (l.9), like medieval knights, armadillos are covered in armor, a soft shell that surrounds their body as their defense mechanism, but even with this kind of protection, armadillos have a big flaw, they are not able to see, armadillos have a poor eyesight, almost blind, that is why Gail compared them to a “blind knight”. Gail also referred to armadillos that try to cross the road as dumb, “The dumb ones get a sudden urge to check the pickings across the asphalt, and nine times out of ten, collide with a ton of moving metal.” (l.3-7). This is a poor example of a simile because she reasons that armadillos are ran over by speeding vehicles because they are dumb, but later on in the poem she compared them to a blind knight. Armadillos are often killed on the road because of their inability to see clearly, a fast moving vehicle that is coming their way is not easily seen because of their blurry vision, not because they are mentally incapable of realizing that crossing the road is deadly for them. In the end their soft shell armor is no match for a speeding heavy metal thus resulting to their death. White also compared the armadillos to money, she states in lines 13 to 15 “There are too damned many armadillos, and beauty, like money, is worth more when it’s scarce.” She is saying that like money, society does not put much attention to armadillos because there are still too