I watched Vick’s public apology with my little son who USED TO wear Michael Vick jerseys to school. It is disturbing to think a certain percentage of the population is honestly going to be swayed by Michael Vick’s “enlightenment” carefully crafted by his overpaid attorneys. Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe a man who has been allegedly torturing animals since childhood coincidentally has a religious epiphany as a result of getting caught and losing his job. I hope I am wrong.

I think it is a sad commentary that we, as a culture, are using the Vick story to compare “What’s worse?” “What’s worse”, we ask, “carelessly fathering illegitimate children, or dogfighting?”. “Dogfighting or gambling?” “Dogfighting or rape?” “Dogfighting or racism?” “Dogfighting or hateful nationalism?” “Dogfighting or (fill in the blank)….?” The comparisons to dogfighting have been endless.

Dogfighting is one more piece of evidence our country is in need of a spiritual transformation (please note I said spiritual and not necessarily religious). Animals are sentient beings - they feel pain, and they suffer, just like we do. They are not more important, or less important than human beings, but like human beings, they are important, too.

Dogfighting pits one dog against another until one of them dies. The survivor gets his flesh torn off, ears ripped off, eyes pulled out, etc., and the reward for being “a winner” is to writhe in pain until the next fight. Enough said. The pictures make my flesh crawl. The losers are tortured, beaten, starved, electrocuted or drowned. For what? Because these poor creatures were unlucky enough to be born a dog!

Every major faith teaches its followers to be responsible stewards of animals and the Earth. Please help us get the word out that caring for animals, just like caring for people, is an important part of just being a decent person and citizen. If we make this a priority, there will be no more dogfighting horror stories, and no more pointless comparisons of evils. Let us all rise, together, to be better people than we are today, shall we?

Chaplain Nancy Cronk
Founder, http://www.AnimalChaplains.com

Like Cate said, I hope that, if nothing else, this case gets the message out that dog fighting is not okay.

Quite a few. Enough to have a BA in history (Early Modern European was my primary area) and a Master of Science in Library Science.

And quite a few more in the decades since.

More than enough to know that that particular rant comes from a certain kind of extremist on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide, and that you have to hear someone’s opinions/positions on current or recent political issues to accurately peg them on that. It’s just not possible to do it on the basis of this kind of through-the-looking-glass rant.

Personal responsibility is not the sole preserve of conservatives. The idea that dogs are “just” personal property, and that an individual is entitled to do anything at all with their personal property, and that therefore any laws or regulations interfering with that use are an intolerable infringement of essential rights—to the extent that there’s any intellectual support for that attitude, it comes from a certain strand of libertarian-conservatism, not from liberalism (or from more traditional conservativsm, either.)

If the quotes you offered come from that blogger’s site (note that you didn’t provide any citations or links, something historians and librarians tend to care about), there is, yawn, some admixture of, oh, perhaps Nation of Islam identity politics, perhaps something else, but mostly, an obsession with sports and a certainty that if His Heroes are being harassed in any way, it must be for illegitimate reasons.

The real issue here is Michael Vick and his animal abuse, which for normal people is not a left/right issue.

The lede bloggers here skew pretty liberal, in case you haven’t noticed. And we’re big on personal responsibility. Sure you’ve noticed that, too.

Just as with patriotism, personal responsibility isn’t the exclusive trademark of the right wing.

So … address the issues, please, and drop the labels.

Think about this. There is no continent on the Earth that you have set foot upon and attempted to live with the existing peoples of that continent. In no corner of the Earth has an indigenous culture been allowed to live without you claiming to “discover” them as if they do not exist until you see them.

Instead, you debate whether or not they are human or savage animals. Instead, you provide them with blankets laden with the small pox virus so you are not faced to force them in battle; so they perish and you burn the dead bodies and live off their good Earth. You come with treaties and platitudes and trickery, telling peoples you come with documents of peace. You come like macroscopic cancer cells tricking the peoples not like you into believing you are the same as those whose bounty you seek. Then, you turn and inject your corrupt, morally bankrupt selves into their ways and tell these people not like you at all, that they never be you; and you kill them and the host - Earth - on which you feed if you must.
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