The View From the Top: A Poem

They say we sit in triumph at the very top,

Where to the victor goes the spoils.

But there's something unnervingly different to me

about the lion's painstaking pursuit 

and the human

who breeds her into a battery cage.

The zebra gets his opportunity

A mad dash — a chance!

But the veal calf? The swine?

Surely the lion, too, would eliminate uncertainty,

if he could. But he can't. And we can.

A pyrrhic victory though —

Isn't it?

Lion, king of the hunt. 

Man, king of the slaughter.

He reigns over the free, the unruly, the wild,

while we lay triumph to 70 billion lives 

who sit in stalls awaiting execution.

Is this what it means to be evolved?