The Emotional Complexity and Worth of Animals

A majority of Part I of Woodsong is concerned with impressing the reader with the emotional complexity of animals. In Chapter 1, Paulsen explains to his reader that he had not truly understood "the woods" until he was forty years old, when he witnessed the brutal slaughter of a doe by a pack of wolves. But while this experience demonstrates how different the animal world is than groups like Disney might lead us to believe, it should be enough to shock the reader into wondering, as Paulsen did, whether animal suffering was not truly horrifying. Paulsen goes on to explain how observing the emotional complexity of one of his dogs, tricking one of the others for her own amusement, led him to no longer trap and kill animals. This is impressed upon the reader more by being faced with the great potential for...