Violence Begets Violence – Justice for Dog Set on Fire

Posted on June 12, 2009
Filed Under Efforts to Save Dogs, Pets and Animals | 2 Comments

People say that Michael Vick’s actions didn’t cause any harm to other people sometimes. Well that’s a bunch of crap. Not only was one of Vick’s business partner’s murdered during this situation, but Vick’s actions against dogs set an example for other kids and people to follow, just like Vick probably followed some twisted role model himself.

I’m not saying that Vick is the start of violence against dogs or animals, but he was not enough a man to stop it before it did more damage, damage that is still spreading today.

Witness the case of the dog that was recently set on fire. Sick, twisted, demented, and one more unfortunate example of people that fell victim to the cowardly examples set before them.

I signed the petition “Justice For Dog Set On Fire”. I’m asking you to sign this petition to help us reach our goal of 10,000 signatures. I care deeply about this cause, and I hope you will support our efforts. This is your chance to say enough is enough and help set a positive example that the rest of society is not as much of a coward as Michael Vick or the other people out there that would kill and torture animals for sport.

Sign the Petition

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Welcome Home Michael Vick – Don’t be Like Mike This Time

Posted on May 20, 2009
Filed Under Major Developments | 11 Comments

Michael Vick snuck out of prison (legally) today and is driving 18 hours back to Virginia from Kansas. Once home he will put a ankle monitoring unit on and stay home for 2 months approximately. He will only be allowed to go to church, work or to visit his probation offer. In the grand scheme of things, it is a slow news day and no one really cares.

Michael Vick is 28 years old and many people feel that he could still be fit enough (physically) to play in the NFL for at least a couple if not a dozen years to come. After protecting his wealth with a penthouse in Florida and vast cash withdrawals of a couple million dollars by analyst estimates, Vick filed bankruptcy. He apparently needs the money and the biggest ticket out there for an ex-con that likes to kill dogs for sport is the NFL.

It is true that the NFL and each of the team franchises around the country are businesses. A business owner can really do what ever they like within the law. That said the service these ‘businesses’ provide is the service of entertainment for football fans around the country. Those fans come in all shapes and sizes, in all three sexes (male, female, & mixed), they come in all ages from babies to the elderly.

They come to watch the game, they come to watch the players, and many come dreaming of what they could do themselves or in some cases could have done themselves if they had been gifted with the skills, ability, and opportunity to play in the NFL. Many of those fans idolize players, just like many people idolized Michael Vick. They spend millions if not billions of dollars on everything from tickets to food to clothes and shoes to jerseys and wide screen TVs. All that money flows into the NFL and to sponsors and the NFL and sponsors pay some of that money to players to keep it coming in and build on the idolization of fans.

Michael Vick was not only a star player, but a star attractor of sponsored money. In fact he might have been better at attracting big dollar sponsors than he was at attaining actual results on the field. He WAS definitely a very good player, but he was never much of a team player nor much of a leader. He was too caught up in his own bad boy image and persona most of the time, too much a lone wolf, and the Falcons suffered due to his inability to rise up to his potential not only as a person that was good at taking money from companies but as a football player that was good at delivering wins.

Michael Vick squandered his opportunities over and over and over again during his years in the NFL. His own actions have proven that he is a very troubled individual. Maybe growing up poor in a difficult neighborhood was too much for him. Maybe the fame and fortune were too big a burden for him to handle. Maybe the women and drugs and gangster lifestyle were just to appealing for a young guy in his early twenties with more money than good sense. It would not surprise me to learn someday that he is a gambling or drug addict.

Gambling and drugs can be objects of what is known as a victimless crime. A society holds something up on a pedestal and states it is immoral to engage in this thing. If you do partake or engage, then you are committing a crime. But these crimes when committed often do not have a victim that suffers.

When Michael Vick sneaks pot through an airport so that he can get high at home or on the road, no one suffers at his hands. When Michael Vick places a bet through a bookie, no one suffers at his hands. But when Michael Vick gets high and then goes out and beats his dog, that’s a little different. When he takes a couple million dollars and finances a dog fighting club, pulling in kids, teenagers, and young men off the street and introducing them to celebrity and money and criminal elements that is different. When he applies his celebrity to what amounted to a traveling animal cruelty freak show on the road that is different. When the people in his entourage start getting assaulted or threatened or in Bud Melton’s case murdered, that is different. These two things of drugs and gambling when grown into a racket move past the victimless crime of individual consumption, and they start hurting real people, not to mention the dogs.

There were two key ingredients that made Michael Vick’s dog fighting escapades possible. NFL money and NFL celebrity. The NFL money kept the wheels and gears moving and the NFL celebrity gave dog fighting some sick sense so legitimacy for the teenagers and twenty somethings around the country that got sucked in. It wasn’t just a notion, ‘lets go fight our dog to the death today’, it was a celebrity appeal, ‘My dog is tough, wouldn’t it be cool if my dog could beat Michael Vick’s dog?’

Michael Vick’s presence gave people in these dog fighting rings more drive to push their own dogs to the limits, to seek out a victory over Michael Vick with their dog as surrogate that they could not achieve physically playing football.

Of course when their dog died, when they lost thousands of dollars gambling, turning to drugs would be a natural outlet, especially for those players that financed their own dogs with drug money.

Michael Vick seriously damaged the NFL. I’m not trying to say that we should hold football players on a pedestal, but too many people do and the NFL not only encourages this, it is part of their business model. Michael Vick essentially leveled the NFL field down to the level of drug dealers and animal abusers. He showed teenagers, well you might not be like Mike when it comes to playing football, but if you have a pet dog, teach that dog to fight to the death some day and you might end up being like Mike then.

Instead of the message of work hard at football, work hard in school and one way or the other you’ll do well in life, he conveyed the message of work hard at football but if that doesn’t pan out, deal drugs a bit, raise some dogs as killers and you can hang with me.

So as I have stated before, I do not want to see Michael Vick return to the NFL. From my perspective that makes about as much sense as giving Osama Bin Laden a free ticket on an airplane to NYC. Michael Vick is out of prison, he is not reformed (hence the house arrest and probation). Hopefully, he will reform some day, but the NFL should not give him a ticket back into the situation that helped corrupt him and that he used to corrupt so many others. Let him have a second or third or fourth chance, let him seek help, and let him heal himself but lets not let history repeat itself.

EDIT

After writing this article I came across this video of Mike Tyson. Consider the problems that Tyson faced whenever he tried to repeat his own history. Definitely seems to be on a better track now that he is doing something new and different.

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After Playing Dogs to Death, Vick is Playing NFL Fans for Chumps

Posted on March 31, 2009
Filed Under Major Developments | 25 Comments

The same guy that took hundreds of millions of dollars fan dollars through the NFL and sponsors, and then used that money to buy dogs for dog fighting and gambling wants $10 million per year to play again.

The former Atlanta Falcons quarterback is hoping to earn as much as $10 million a year or more, according to court filings in his bankruptcy case. Under the plan he submitted to the court, Vick would keep the first $750,000 of his annual income over the next five years. After that, a percentage would go to his creditors based on a sliding scale. ajc.com

It would appear that Michael Vick missed his true calling. He should scrub the idea of going back to work in the NFL and try and get a job at AIG. Are you half surprised that he doesn’t want bail out money too? He does have to pay off the debt from the wreckage of bad business deals, lies, and broken promises that he left in his wake. Why shouldn’t the government step in and help him if he is so important to the future of the NFL after all?

Even if you buy the argument of whether or not Michael Vick is theoretically worth $10 million per year based on his former skills multiplied by about 2-3 years of the field and in confinement, the reality is that he’s not worth $50,000 per year. (not unless Vick is paying $50,000 a year to play!)

Vick is heading to his bankruptcy trial on Thursday, afterwards, he will be returned to prison until May when he will be released on home arrest to one of his remaining mansions.

There are many many fans, dog lovers, and dog loving, fans that do not want to see Michael Vick return to the NFL based on what he did. I doubt even Michael Vick would want to place a bet on how many blue collar workers that were out raged by the bonuses paid to Wall Street (bonuses that were a lot lower than a salary of $10 million per year) are going to be outraged when Michael Vick, convict, can step out of prison and sign a deal with their fan money for $10 million.

That’s the thing that some people don’t quite get. They say, the man served his time for killing dogs, let him go back to work. Well like banks getting bailed out with tax payer money, the NFL and their sponsors like Nike, live on something very similar to tax payer money, its called fan money. And all of our fan money, hundreds of millions of dollars that went to Michael Vick helped him do what he did, kill the dogs that he did, hang out with other people that killed dogs too across multiple states, and promoted a criminal atmosphere that led to the murder of one of Vick’s dog suppliers and owner opponent in the rings. The NFL didn’t fully experience the start of the financial crisis last year. After all Wall Street banks were still throwing $700,000 NFL parties on location during football games with taxpayer money. But times have changed a lot since the NFL season ended.

The NFL is inviting a severe fan dollar backlash if they allow Vick back in the league with a salary that would make a Wall Street fat cat drool and sell an asset backed security to any given small town for 10x its value. The NFL can let Vick back in within an environment where fans can’t afford to go to the games as much nor spend as much while they are there and where advertisers are cutting back left and right. The NFL can bring him back, but it is a very bad strategic move. It will be bad for business and bad for football.

Michael Vick took our fan money and committed those crimes, and now he wants $10 million per year from us to pay for the things he should have paid for with the first few hundred million dollar he took from us. Plus, he wants to pocket $750k per year just for himself. Do you have $10 million or even an extra $750k lying around to waste, and even if you did, do you really want to spend it so that Michael Vick can go play a football game to maintain mansions in two states and a $2 million penthouse condo in South Beach?

If you say yes, while you are at it would you vote a corrupt politician back into office after serving their time in prison to get a fat tax payer funded salary? Obviously, many of us would not and we do want to see Michael Vick do essentially the same with a fan funded salary for $10 million. If Obama can’t bailout the Big three automakers, then why should fans, especially those looking at a future on the unemployment roles bail out Michael Vick, a man that has proven he’s not to big to fail, but can’t quite seem to prove that he’s big enough to survive with out hand outs from fans.

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Vick Has to Pay $$ to Get Out of Jail & Go Broke

Posted on March 11, 2009
Filed Under Minor Developments | 5 Comments

As crazy as it sounded, it was actually very reasonable for US Bankruptcy Judge Frank Santoro to decide that

Michael Vick did need to show up for his own bankruptcy hearing
That Vicks demeanor could not be determined via video as the US government wanted, and
That Michael Vick would have to pay for himself to be transported from prison to Virginia for the hearing.
source: Judge: Vick must appear at hearing, pay for travel

Vick was also not able to find any bidders at auction for his $3.2 million mansion in Atlanta.

Vick will likely end up on home confinement in the near future, and could be available to play football in the UFL or the NFL.

We here still feel that Michael Vick should not be allowed back into the NFL, where he earned millions of dollars from fans only to use that money to kill dogs and engage in illegal gambling activities. He may have paid for his crimes to the government, but there is no reason why NFL fans should throw more good money after a bad apple that squandered our good will.

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1 Lawsuit Forward, 2 Options Back for Vick – PETA, Reeves, Financial Advisors

Posted on January 27, 2009
Filed Under Minor Developments | 3 Comments

Michael Vick has had a busy week as he launched a lawsuit against his financial advisors seeking $2 million. Given that there have been many reports of Vick spending upwards of $900 thousand dollars in cash in the time period shortly before going to prison, there is probably no surprise in the concept that some of his financial advisors or accountants may have taken him for a bit of a ride. When a person is engaged in illegal activity (like dog fight gambling and other activities) it is all too likely that they will not have a strong focus on their other financial interests and this opens the doors for financial advisors, managers and more to take a piece of the pie.

Vick also came into the news surrounding conversations that his former coach Dan Reeves working for Mike Singletary in San Francisco might make the crazy decision of bringing Vick into the San Francisco NFL fold. On many levels, that would appear to be a non-starter as Singletary has an exemplary history of not tolerating discipline problems, nor suffering fools. Plus, the fans of San Francisco might just prove to be the most hostile crowd ever to face off against a person that ran a dog fighting ring.

Finally, PETA has withdrawn an offer to have Michael Vick on a public service announcement after they learned that Vick was trying to leverage the spot for public relations reason in order to further his goals of re-entering the NFL. We don’t regularly agree with PETA here, but we do agree with their stance

The organization said an agreement was reached with Vick’s representatives to shoot the spot, but that Vick’s lawyers sought assurance from PETA that the group would support his return to the N.F.L. “Saying sorry and getting his ball back after being caught enjoying killing dogs in hideously cruel ways for many years doesn’t cut it,” said Ingrid E. Newkirk, the president of PETA.

Especially from the perspective that returning to the NFL enables Vick to re-enter a lifestyle that promoted this problem in the first place. You might as well send a cocaine addict off to Columbia to work in the fields as a missionary.

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Don’t Let Barking Dogs Lie, Train Them

Posted on January 1, 2009
Filed Under Efforts to Save Dogs | 5 Comments

If we work hard to look for a silver lining that has come out of the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal and related crimes, it can easily be identified as all of the dogs that were saved. Conventional wisdom before Michael Vick’s dogs were saved, held that Pitt Bulls could not be re-trained to be good and ‘safe’ pets after they had been trained to fight. In most cases where dogs were seized from property where they had been trained to fight, they were typically killed.

The dogs that were rescued from Michael Vick have in many cases been retrained and conditioned and are now living happily with real families.

Now, your average family that has a dog will not necessarily be likely to experience these extreme conditions with a pit. However, many families with pets also tend to hold to the conventional wisdom that their current pet at whatever age they may be might just be set in their ways. Just because a dog is 4 or 8 or 10 even, it doesn’t mean that they too can’t be trained.

It is often the pet owner that is preventing the training because they hold to that incorrect conventional wisdom that old dogs can’t learn new tricks, when in fact the old dog may never get a chance to learn because the owners are not giving them a chance.

In reality dogs of all ages can be trained and retrained. Regardless of whether a pup is sent for initial puppy training, or an older dog attends dog obedience school, it is possible to train and re-train that pooch!

Now, I do not write this standing on a sanctimonious pedestal. I own three dogs. One of those dogs has developed and re-enforced a very bad barking habit. For quite some time she barked incessantly for no reason. We moved a couple years back and our new home is located near water. We get a lot of wild geese and ducks coming into our yard and they tend to make a mess everywhere, getting onto our porch, decks, sidewalks, cars, and roofs.

We taught our dog to bark and keep the geese and ducks herded out of and away from these areas. The fowl have now been trained and they don’t set foot in our yard mostly.

Unfortunately for our barking dog, her mission in life is now without a purpose. So she has repurposed her training and now barks to little effect at the birds in the distance. The birds do not move and she does not stop barking.

Things are getting to the point where we need to consider some more in depth training that surpasses our own abilities, because we essentially need to reverse some general training that we instigated and also curb something that was previously a bad habit.

I came across a group that offers dog training Toronto. They also have franchises all around North America for that matter. They specialize in training dogs in their homes or yards. For our dog, it would do little good to train her not to bark in obedience school because the stimulus for her barking exists in our yard and not in a ‘school’ environment. That’s when you really need an expert to come and visit and help with the conditioning.

For many people, they might attend the quick weekend sessions at the local strip mall with a pet store located there. Those training sessions are usually more about training the pet owners and less about training the actual canine. For what we need, we need the dog to be trained and we might need some re-conditioning ourselves. Fortunately for us, and for people around the country, thanks to the tragedies surrounding Michael Vick’s dogs, the dogs that survived have helped to show people that old dogs can learn new tricks, even in the most extreme circumstances.

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Michael Vick – Banking on Debt Dismissal in Jail & Triumphant Return to the NFL with New Fat Salary?

Posted on December 29, 2008
Filed Under Minor Developments | 7 Comments

When we first started this website we had several goals to seek justice, which was being abused and to prevent Michael Vick from harming the fans that had supported his rise to financial success. We are all for Michael Vick finding success in life after prison, but still do not want to see him return to the NFL where he maligned almost every trust that was bestowed on him by fans, his team, his coaches, the NFL, his business partners, his creditors, his sponsors, and even his criminal buddies.

He’s trying to have $20+ million in debt renegotiated while he holds on to $16 million in assets. But this is based on him earning 12 cents an hour in prison. We could see a scenario where his debt is wiped away by the courts down to say $10 million and he could keep his $16 million in assets. Then a few months later he could return to the NFL and a large contract (not as large as before, but after profiting $10 million in bankruptcy, it doesn’t have to be too big for Vick to still have a great year financially.

A committee of creditors, including the Atlanta Falcons, filed the objection Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Newport News, Va. A hearing on whether the disclosure statement should be approved is scheduled for next Tuesday.

…

A disclosure statement submitted in the case last month listed real estate holdings, luxury cars and boats, business interests, bank accounts and expenses to support a large extended family.

Plus it would appear that Vick or his accountants were either not that good at book keeping (not surprising considering all the illegal activities Vick was involved in, some of which he pled guilty in court) or possibly they are trying to hide cash and assets and cover the expenses for lots and lots of relatives before Vick’s creditors are paid off.

If you or I file for bankruptcy, odds are the bank and courts are not going to look to favorably on the scheme of us trying to support all of our extended family first before paying off any debt. Our relatives will have to go out, get jobs, fend for themselves, and pay their own bills.

It also showed millions in unexplained cash withdrawals and transfers over the last two years. For example, the creditors said in their objection that Vick’s papers list about $1.1 million in transfers authorized by a former associate, about $1 million marked as "cash out miscellaneous" and nearly $2.3 million in transfers between Vick accounts.

"With such large sums of the Debtor’s money unaccounted for, it would be impossible for the Debtor’s disclosure statement to contain ‘adequate information’ regarding his finances," the creditors wrote.

Vick’s disclosure statement also says he "has every reason to believe that upon his release, he will be reinstated into the NFL, resume his career and be able to earn a substantial living." Vick’s plan for paying his debts is premised on his return to pro football, but the creditors say they need more assurance.

source - The Associated Press: Creditors object to Vick finance statement

Bottom line, if Vick returns to the NFL as a quarter back, it will be a travesty. Returning as a coach or maybe a counselor for the other derelict players in the NFL might not be a bad gig for Vick. Heck he could go into acting or anything for all I care, but let it be a fresh start.

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Violence Begets Violence – Justice for Dog Set on Fire

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Welcome Home Michael Vick – Don’t be Like Mike This Time

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After Playing Dogs to Death, Vick is Playing NFL Fans for Chumps

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Vick Has to Pay $$ to Get Out of Jail & Go Broke

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1 Lawsuit Forward, 2 Options Back for Vick – PETA, Reeves, Financial Advisors

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Don’t Let Barking Dogs Lie, Train Them

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Michael Vick – Banking on Debt Dismissal in Jail & Triumphant Return to the NFL with New Fat Salary?

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