All-star athlete and recent media magnet Michael Vick is getting a lot of "boo-hoo" coverage in the press. He has to go to jail! He could loose his career! What a gifted player! It's a tragedy!
What a load of crap. What no press story that I've heard or read seems to focus on is that he and his friends were unimaginably cruel to animals. FOR PROFIT. Michael Vick -ten million dollars is not enough? You have to electrocute dogs so they will kill each other in order for you to clear an extra hundred? You need some pocket money for Arby's or something? Shame on you.
I see people comparing dog fighting to human sports like boxing and football. There are several flaws to this argument, but I'll only touch on two:
1. Humans choose to fight for sport. Animals don't. Left to their own devices animals will fight for resources like food, shelter, appropriate reproduction partners. They do not fight for fun. Animals under human influence develop unnatural aggression, and we foster that tendency by selecting aggressive animals to reproduce and treating them badly during life. We choose to fight for fun. This is wrong.
2. In human sport, the death of your opponent is not the goal. When humans force animals to fight, it is. Whether the losing animal is killed by the winner, or by its handler after the fight, losing means death for these creatures. Not a nice "this shot will make you sleep" death either, but a violent, prolonged, tortuous death.
Whether Michael Vick is a talented athlete is not as important as the fact that he is a flawed human being. The press talks about him as an object, a concept, an engine for profit. Just like the dogs he abused. Perhaps his dog fighting ring holds psychological resonance for him. Perhaps he uses the dogs to act out how betrayed he feels by society. He knows that even though he's rich and famous he's got no credibility where it matters. That he was only defined by his physical abilities. Never seen as a person. I don't have any sympathy for him. To make an excuse for him based on any of the influences I've described is to continue to deny his humanity, the essence of which is free will . He made a choice every day to be cruel. He could have chosen not to.
