Animal cruelty is my biggest enemy. In my lifetime, I fought several people including researchers (used animals in research), rodeos, and animal hunters who did animal cruelty and/or made sick jokes of animal killings. Modern rodeos, researchers, and hunters are a graphic portrait of animal cruelty.
For instance, Chrysler's sponsorship of rodeo funds calf roping, steer wrestling and roping, wild cow milking and other unnatural events in which unwilling, gentle animals are bullied into submission.
Three years ago, Coca-Cola rescinded its rodeo sponsorship, due to the inhumane treatment of animals. Numerous investigative videos and media reports have exposed routine animal cruelty on the rodeo circuit.
I cannot purchase products from any company that helps to sustain the brutalization of animals.
The following poem, “A Black Rabbit Dies For its Country” written by Gavin Ewart, and extracted from page 8 of “Poetry For Living” outlines a rabbit’s feelings, emotions and views of living in a laboratory, and experiencing laboratory life.
“A Black Rabbit Dies For it's Country”
Born in the lab, I never saw the grass
or felt the direct touch of wind or sun
and if a rabbit’s nature is to run
free on the earth, I missed it: though the glass
never let shot shoot or predators pass,
while I was warm against my mother’s side
something was waiting in the centrifuge
(the world’s a cage, although that cage is huge)
and separate I lived until I died-
watered and fed, I didn’t fret, inside,
and all the time I was waiting for the paste,
scooped with a spatula from the metal rim,
the concentrate bacillus at the brim,
and lived the life of feeling and taste,
I didn’t know it. Knowing would be a waste,
in any case, and anthrax is the hard,
stuff that knocks out the mice, the dogs, the men,
you haven’t any chance at all and when
they’ve finished with you, you’re down on a card
how could I know to be upon my guard,
when they pushed the container into line,
with the infected airstream?Breath is life:
though something more deadly than a knife
cut into me, I was still feeling fine,
and never guessed the next death would be mine-
how many minutes later lungs would choke
as feet beat out the seconds like a drum,
hands held me on the table:this was a sum
with the predictable ending of a joke
fighting I died, and no god even spoke.
