Tusks then, dung now
By Venkatesh Govindarajan
An Animal Rights Poem from All-Creatures.org

All of God's creatures have rights, a fact that most people don't seem to recognize. This includes both human and non-human animals, but not all of them can speak for themselves.

Tusks then, dung now
By Venkatesh Govindarajan, Senior Lecturer, Karlstad University, Sweden

Pappa and Sonny

emptied their bowels

depositing dung,

a few bushels.

From a distance, later

they saw a man,

scooping and dumping

dung into a van.

Pappa told Sonny,

“Those who had once

killed Grandpa for ivory,

now wait for our excrescence.”

Sonny quipped in at once,

“Friend Jumbo told me,

our dung is used by man

for epistolography. ”

The Hindu Elephant God

of wisdom and learning

smiled from the heavens.

elephant dung

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