Blog Post #10

For my Rhetorical Artifact, I constructed an Animal Rights advertisement. This advertisement illustrated the cruelties and abuses the Fur Industry constantly perpetuates. Fundamentally, my Rhetorical Artifact embodies 43 gruesome pictures of animals from Fur Factory Farms, along with a poem depicting the conditions and consequences these Fur Factory Farms maintain. My Rhetorical Artifact serves to address the exigence of action. Hence, instead of being immobilized with indifference, my Rhetorical Artifact’s purpose is to motivate individuals to combat Animal Abuse. Ultimately, the Rhetorical Artifact I constructed aims to Change the Perceptions of Social Reality and Legitimize the Social Movement through the following Strategies and Tactics: Storytelling, Framing, Explicit Imagery, and Polarization. 

Predominately, in my Rhetorical Artifact, I composed a poem that recounts an alarming story of the Animal Abuses that daily transpires in the Fur Industry. Titled "The Desperate and Desolately Dead," the continuous 'D' sound is commonly associated with words such as, Danger, Disaster, and Dread, all of which have a negative connotation. This sound serves to heighten the audience's apprehension even before reading the poem. Furthermore, the poem I constructed, uses personification as an essential strategy, thereby, giving animals human characteristics throughout the poem. This can be seen as they "pled," and by the agonizing human emotion the animals conveyed. Moreover, the poem serves to frame the Fur Industry in a negative light, as it depicts the repercussions of skinning animals. This claim can be supported by Lines 10-15 of the poem, "Fur Factories Murder / Infested with Fecal Matter / Polluted with Toxic Chemicals / Our Health is at Risk / As They Shatter Policies at a Brisk Pace / & Cause our Environment to be Defaced." Overall, the poem ends with a Call to Action, which critically serves to both Change the Perceptions of Social Reality and Legitimize the Social Movement.

Besides the poem, my Rhetorical Artifact encompasses an Animal Cruelty Collage, that illustrates 43 abusive images derived from Fur Factory Farms. These image polarize the audience into two groups: those that support Fur Fashion and thus this type of brutality, and those that are against the Fur Industry and are Pro Animal Rights. Fundamentally, the images I gathered were each edited with a Color Splash Tool, that changed each picture first to black and white, and then the sections of my choosing to be seen in color.  Overall, I organized the Collage with the bloodiest pictures surrounding the poster, and images displaying the animals faces towards the center. This organization was a predominate tactic I used, since the Bloody (red) images draws the viewer in physically, while the images surrounding the poem acts to emotionally draw the viewer in, and thus allow the viewer to become more sympathetic towards the cause itself. 

The genre of my Rhetorical Artifacts is an Internet Advertisement. I thought that an Internet Advertisement was the best route to go, to carry out my rhetorical message, because it would allow for mainstream circulation at a rapid pace. My Rhetorical Artifact could generally be seen and circulated at any Pro-Animal Rights website, and even through Facebook and Tumblr. I believe that in order to Change the Perceptions of Social Reality and Legitimize the Social Movement, I would need to gather as much support and visual contact with the audience as possible, which is what an Internet Advertisement precisely does.