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Title Significance

             In the first home that Jennings is taken to named Home of the Angels, he is lonely, scared and confused. The nuns who run the place are strict and they hit him. Then, one night his new friend, Mark, takes him to line that is forming behind a desk. Sister Clair, Jennings's favorite nun, comes, unlocks a cabinet and hands out stuff animals to the eager children waiting in line. Jennings is handed a fuzzy dog with floppy ears and immediately loves him. When Jennings wakes up, he is mortified to see that his fuzzy companion, named Doggie, has gone missing. When Mark calms him and tells him that the nuns take them away at night, Jennings asks why. Mark heatedly replies, "It's the rules! They cage the animals at night!"(26). This saying or theme is constantly repeated throughout this memoir: "it was the first time Doggie was ever away from his cage and out of the home"(41).
The title, They Cage the Animals at Night, has a much deeper meaning then how it appears. The caged animals represent the foster children:"' [Sister Clair], why do you do that? ... Cage the animals at night.' We don't want to Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that we are given we have to care for. If we didn't cage them up in one place we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them...my heart would break if I just saw one of those animals lying by the wayside...unloved'"(56). When the subject is changed from stuff animals to foster children, the passage still makes complete sense. Inferred from this passage, night is a symbol of the danger of the pain and hurt in the real world. Sister Clair may or may not have been talking about foster children but, she goes on to say "our kind of animals need lots of love" meaning, foster children need a lot of love to make up for the fact that they lack a family (57). If the animals symbolize the children, then the cage symbolizes their sadness, their desire to be wanted, and the homes that most are juggled in throughout their entire childhoods. Many times when Jennings would try to fall asleep, he often heard the little sounds of the night:" I heard someone cough and someone else sniffle... I heard someone crying"(84). At night is when the sorrow seems to dawn on most of the foster kids. The cage however, is not just within:"' I feel like a prisoner... I know, I just never thought about it until now'"(194). "'I caught this kid trying to escape,' ' it's not 'escape' John, it's 'runaway'"(213). All of these aspects add up to the overall conclusion that they cage the animals at night also means foster children are put into homes to protect them from the harm of the outside world, yet fail to protect them from sorrow inside.

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