They Cage the Animals at Night: The True Story of an Abandoned Child's Struggle for Emotional Survival

Jennings Michael Burch

Oct 1985 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

The heartbreaking, iconic true story of an abandoned little boy’s horrific journey through the American foster care system.

On a misty evening in Brooklyn, Jennings Michael Burch’s mother, too sick to care for him, left her eight-year-old son at an orphanage with the words, “I’ll be right back.” She wasn’t.

Shuttled through a bleak series of foster homes, orphanages, and institutions, Jennings never remained in any of them long enough to make a friend. Instead, he clung to a tattered stuffed animal named Doggie, his sole source of comfort in a frightening world.

Here, in his own words, Jennings Michael Burch reveals the abuse and neglect he experienced during his lost childhood. But while his experiences are both shocking and devastating, his story is ultimately one of hope—the triumphant tale of a forgotten child who somehow found the courage to reach out for love, and found it waiting for him.

Ratings and reviews

Jennings Michael Burch writes about his experience growing up in and out of orphanages and foster homes. The story begins in 1949 when his mother took him to an orphanage with almost no explanation. Thus began a long journey of periods in an orphanage, farmed out to foster homes, and then back home with his mother and older brothers followed by another orphanage and so on. What he describes is cruelty hard to imagine, some physical and some emotional. Maybe it was the postwar age and maybe it was the system, but no one seemed to think it important to explain to a child what was going on. As he remembers it, the first time his mother took him to an orphanage, he didn’t know what was happening but could tell something was wrong with here. He asked but she didn’t tell him and, after arriving, only said that he must wait on her there but she’d be back. He assumed that meant the same day. At the orphanage, no one told him why he was there, what he could expect, nor even the rules. He learned the rules when he was punished (light punishment was missing a meal) or from other kids. Playtime was unsupervised and tribal. And since he was temporary, there was no education provided. A shortcoming of the book was that, being written from the standpoint of a child, it was totally a recollection as a child would remember things and some of it seems to be unrealistic, sometimes to the positive and sometimes to the negative. An example is a rapidly-formed friendship with a bus driver who even pauses the route to talk to him, once even getting off the bus to talk for what seems to have been a significant amount of time (with no complaint from other passengers?). That is not to say that it didn’t happen, just that it may have not been exactly as it sounds. Some of the abuse is also hard to understand, not because I can’t believe they happened, but because his description of how they played out do not seem to be realistic. Nonetheless, that doesn’t diminish the abuse that he experienced, nor do I believe that he made them up or made them worse than they were, only that some of the details and context seem lacking and anything that sounds hard to believe makes it easy to cast down on the story, weakening the book’s impact. Having said that, Burch has given us a brutally honest look at a life that most of us can hardly imagine. It is a description of a system that was broken–both the orphanages that were managed with almost no oversight, a foster system that paid people to take children temporarily without any real background checking or oversight, and with no consequences for either when abuse was discovered. It shows the plight of a single mother struggling to get by with little help and what the results can be on the children, though Burch seems to have handled it better than most of his brothers. It reveals how little importance our society places on mental health care. I do recommend this book but wish it had been better edited. Yes, it is the memory of a child, but it needed to be more filled out. There is a brief account at the end telling what happened to family after this story ended, but I wonder if the older brothers had any part in reviewing this or even contributing any insight to the rest of the book. I just think that it could have been so much more. And, if you’re curious about the “animals” they cage at night, in his first orphanage, there are stuffed animals. Each child can choose one each night if they’ve been good. The children can take them to bed, but the animals are collected after they go to sleep and locked in a cabinet to avoid their getting lost.

This book was great! Jennings has been through so much. I read this story to find out what homes were like and wow did I get the answer.

As much as I would love to read this offering, it hits too close to home, never been in an orphanage, maybe I should have? 46 yo now and literally not one person, medical or not listens to anything I'm on about, never have, so not a thing to hope for even.

About the author

Jennings Michael Burch was the author of the bestselling autobiography They Cage the Animals at Night. He worked as a New York City policeman, a chauffeur, a theater manager, a magazine pressman, and a short-order cook. He held a B.A. in forensic psychology from John Jay College. He passed away in 2013.