The Plight of the Tortured
By Charlotte
An Animal Rights Poem from All-Creatures.org

I made a connection today
Through eyes new to the scene
She looked into mine and I into hers
Those eyes shone love so keen

The prison she was trapped in
Provided hate no love
No kindness, no warmth, no comfort
She only knew the touch of a sterile glove

No soft bed given to sooth her
Through the terrors and pains of the night
Concrete floor hard on her little paws
Can no one else see her plight?

Restricted the joys to love and be loved
Was this little souls heart
That when I looked into her big brown eyes
It tore my own heart apart

I'll never forget what I saw today
The pain, the prison, the torture
She will die in this prison, she'll never live
She can't be saved by a court order

She's trapped to die and trapped to suffer
In this world of mechanical chemicals

A world so loveless, so mean and cruel
The animals of pharmaceuticals.

---

Why I wrote this poem:

Today, I went through a privileged as well as horrid traumatizing experience. I got access into an animal testing lab on a college trip.

What I saw there, as a girl who has been brought up veggie, and who changed vegan this year, I already had a rough idea of the real reality to what I'd see - so I already know what I was shown was in fact only the ' best bits' and not the real happenings within this establishment.

I'm sending this, because I feel like I need to share my experience anonymously because I can't hold what I saw in. Unfortunately, I have no pictures to prove what I saw, apart from the other accounts of people who experienced it with me on the trip.

Now we were shown very very mild things, but it still affected us all greatly.

Starting my story here I want to say firstly, that seeing these animals on a video is one thing, but being there, actually looking at them and making that connection is another. At this particular facility, they had thousands of poor little souls, this included, mice, rats, rabbits, goats, pigs and dogs.

First we were shown the cages they were kept in, the cages are appalling, mice have a shoe box sized cage with bed and a chew block in - no other enrichment provided, this is the same for the rabbits and rats apart from the rats cages where about two show boxes next to each other and the rabbits were about four.

This is all these animals had and they have to spend their lives in this confinement - unsurprisingly they eventually develop stereotypical behavior that is if they aren't killed and don't die a painful death first as they can live up to 1 month to 3 years depending on how long the experiment they are being abused for lasts.

We then saw mice being picked up, flipped over and having injections into their faces, we also saw rats being discarded into buckets then picked up and having a tube pushed down their throat with some sort of liquid then squeezed in. The way they handle the animals is so aggressive and disregarding - you can tell they have no feeling for what they are doing. This shocked a lot of my class as they looked at me like did you know, I just replied it gets worse believe me, they aren't showing us the worse of what they do.

They then took us into the pigs and dogs, their enclosures where exactly the same, they were all about as big as a toilet cubicle, with half a handle of shavings on the floor and a thin plastic shelf for the animals to supposedly sleep on. No soft bedding had been provided and some had a single toy each, but some didn't. The cubicles very much resembled cells as they had metal like walls, this was it. This was the animals existence, they never experienced fetch, the sun or the snow or the outside world, they are confined.

We were told the dogs were taken out for fifteen minutes twice a day, but that "after 5 or 6 minutes we normally take them back because they become bored" so most dogs are getting less than half an hour stimulation a day, this is for their whole lives, which could range from 1 month of torture to up to three years.
Now, when we saw these dogs, it hit me hard because you made eye contact and a connection, and there was a singular dog that wasn't bouncing up and going mad that people were at the door like all the others, she was crouched and she was nervous.

I made this connection with her, she looked at me with eyes so big and brown, so gorgeous, I fell in love, I wanted to take her, as well as all the animals away from their suffering but of course I couldn't and I never will be able to save that little soul who was just a number to the facility, whom I thought I'd name Petal, because to me, that sweet little dog who was begging for help, was a flower she'd never get to sniff that was gentle and delicate.

We then went onto the pigs and went into the room they were kept in, the pigs most probably from my guess we're being used for some sort of eye drop testing as gunge and red liquid poured from their eyes, and these little piglet souls all came wagging their tails to the front - just like the dogs. Full of so much trust and love, I bent down and tickled one on the nose so he got to feel a loving touch in his life, even though we weren't meant to touch. In my heart his name is Wilber.

We then left these areas and were taken back out the facility to a presentation room where they tried hard to justify the way they kept the animals, they also showed us pictures of how the monkeys they had were kept.

They monkeys were kept in exactly the same as the dogs and pigs with two more extra shelves, that is all.

They then went on to say how good they were etc., etc. I don't think anyone fell for it. At the end of the presentation, they went on to say, they were animal lovers. This pissed a lot of us off as you can imagine because you can't love something you torture so much.

So today, I've been shedding tears for the animals I saw and could not help. I know in my heart they showed us the least effecting bits, they haven't shown what they really do. My heart has broken for these animals that have been, will be and are being tortured. So I wrote a poem, titled 'the plight from the tortured.'