My daughter has decided to make protecting animals her passion. She has learned many things along the way, and taught me many lessons, for which I am grateful. She has witnessed first-hand the cruel way we treat animals, and the inhuman emptiness found even in some animal lovers.
Her most important lesson is that, even if we eat or breed them, we have a responsibility to animals. They have souls, simpler, more basic perhaps, but souls nonetheless. Heeding this lesson is part of man's own civilizing process.
Thus there is needful cruelty and there is needless cruelty.
Raising dogs to fight, to kill other dogs, and murdering those who don't do well is needless cruelty. When the Humane Society or ASPCA breaks up a dog-fighting ring, all the dogs involved must be put down. It is needful cruelty. Their training makes them impossible to place as pets. It's not their nature which is bad, it's their nurture. And it can't be unlearned.
People who engage in dog fighting dehumanize themselves. They hold all life as cheap. They forfeit all sympathy, all claims on our emotions. They deserve nothing more than what they dish out to the animals.
Fortunately we don't usually do that. We have courts, we have a legal
system, we have the presumption of innocence, and a range of prisons
that treat people differently depending upon how dangerous they are. We
even have, in this country, an 8th Amendment on which you can make a
claim of cruel and inhuman punishment.
Dogs don't have this. All they have is us.
As you may have guessed by now, I should not be on any jury which would decide the guilt of Michael Vick, nor on the location where he would spend any jail sentence. The evidence against him looks very clear to me. He has been a terribly cruel man, and lied to everyone who believed in him. The people who bought his denials, from Falcons owner Arthur Blank on down, are going to take terrible losses by washing their hands of him. But this is what they must do.
No one can be a fan of someone who practices evil in their daily life. No one can have sympathy for those who engage in this kind of casual cruelty. It is a very short distance from the attitudes Michael Vick exhibited with his dogs and those Saddam Hussein exhibited with his political opponents.
And as to those who would defend Michael Vick at this point, I feel the same way about you.
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