Vegan Poetry

Vivisection

We humans have a new disease, what are we to do?
Let’s find another species and give it to them too
Will that help to cure us? We haven’t got a clue
but it gives sadistic scientists a job they like to do

Inject it in an animal, try the monkeys first
if it doesn’t kill them keep injecting ’til they burst
It’s not affecting them so much, in us it gets much worse
Lucky them! Let’s cut them up and open like a purse

This new brand of cigarettes means there’s tests we have to do
Let’s use the rabbits over there, the ones blinded by shampoo
Keep pumping smoke into their lungs and watch their skin turn blue
and if they die, the dogs we’ll try, to get this product through

Put those mice in water and leave them ’til they drown
This monkey won’t stop struggling, someone help me hold her down
Don’t forget to monitor the heart-rate while they’re thrashing all around
I’m hungry now, let’s go to lunch, its happy hour in town

Today I sliced into a rat to have a look inside
I gave some poison to a cat and watched him while he died
I heated up some puppies until their eyeballs fried
Then went home to my family who welcomed me with pride

The government gives funding to the work we have to do
A necessary evil they say, but that’s not true
They say “they’re only animals, not the same as me or you”
So what’s the point of all the torture that we put them through?

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I wrote this poem from the point of view of the ‘experimentors’, as only they know what really goes on in those laboratories. In the outside world they must seem so respectable, a scientist! But the things they do to innocent animals behind closed doors whilst posing as normal everyday people is abhorrent. I wonder what their families would think if they could see them at work.

Paul Holroyd gave up meat in 1985 but has only been vegan since 2020. After finding out the truth about the dairy, egg and meat industries, he felt he owed it to the animals to speak up for them through activism; the poetry came a year later after protesting outside a puppy breeding facility. One short poem led to another but the poetry only really started to flow once he made the choice to live in a van, this new lifestyle freed up his creative mind. He now has hundreds of poems covering many different subjects, but veganism and animal rights remain at the core of his writing.