Chickens and cows farmed for food are treated far worse than these dogs were treated. One may say that It is different because we eat the meat to survive. The food and energy invested in growing these animals could produce 10 times the food for humans that the animals themselves produce. Not only do we not need meat to survive, it is wasteful!

Fighting dogs is as much a luxury for Mike Vick as Eating a hamburger is to you, and he is not hurting animals any worse than you are. He does not deserve to be punished like this just because America has a soft spot for dogs.

Sandy Kobrin

Sunday, August 26, 2007
A young fan reveals his feelings about Philadelphia Phill…

National Football League superstar Michael Vick is in trouble, serious trouble. Federal prosecutors charged the Atlanta Falcons quarterback with animal abuse for his role as the alleged leader of a dog-fighting ring and, after denying it for months, Vick just pleaded guilty. He faces stiff sentencing.

He’s also in big trouble with the NFL, which has said he might never play professionally again. According to Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL’s Player Association, “the practice of dog fighting is offensive and completely unacceptable.”

I just wish the NFL had the same outrage toward spousal abuse and other forms of domestic violence. But they don’t. Not by a long shot.

Scores of NFL players as well as players from the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball have been convicted of domestic abuse, yet they play on with no fear of losing their careers. Most pay small fines, if that, and are back on the field immediately.

The message is clear. Beat a woman? Play on. Beat a dog? You’re gone.

What could possibly account for this bizarre situation?

Part of it is that it’s the dog days of August – the notoriously silly season for news – so the Vick story has attracted tremendous press attention. But it’s been all over TV as well during the past four months, since Vick’s indictment in April.

The anti-animal-abuse lobby, meanwhile, is going after Vick with all four paws.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which received almost $30 million in contributions last year, according to its Web site, and other animal-rights organizations are demanding a boycott of companies that continue to sponsor Vick and are bombarding the NFL with letters demanding a no-tolerance policy when it comes to cruelty to animals by football players.

On blogs, the outrage continues on sackvick.net and other sites, with comments like “lets give #7, 7 to life,” or “let’s make Michael Vick into dog food.”

A cottage industry of anti-Vick merchandise is out there. You can buy a chew toy for your dog in with a likeness of Vick, a “hang Vick” hat or even an eye-for-eye justice T-shirt that says “Stick Vick in the Pit.”

Vick has already lost most of his sponsorship deals worth millions of dollars and he deserves to lose a whole lot more.

But the disproportionate punishment of Vick – while athletes who commit violence against women are let off the hook – has to be wondered at.

Might it be that domestic violence and spousal abuse is so pervasive in sports that it’s simply too costly for leagues to suspend so many men? What would happen after all if those poor teams couldn’t fill their rosters?

The number of athletes arrested for domestic violence or spousal abuse is astounding.

A three-year study published in 1995 by researchers at Northwestern University found that while male student athletes are 3 percent of the population, they represent 19 percent of sexual assault perpetrators and 35 percent of domestic violence perpetrators.

There are even Web site chronicles that treat the steady stream of offenders as if it were a joke. Check out badjocks.com or playersbehavingbadly.com. Then again, don’t. It’s enough to make you sick.

Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, has made it his mandate to crack down on athletes who misbehave.

In April, Goodell introduced a new conduct policy that stiffens penalties and holds franchises responsible when their players get into trouble.

Just recently Goodell suspended the Tennessee Titans’ troubled player Adam “Pacman” Jones for the 2007 season.

Jones had been arrested five times since he was drafted by the NFL in 2005 and has been involved in 11 police investigations. Most recently, during what amounted to a brawl at a strip club, he grabbed a stripper and banged her head into the ground. He will not be paid during his suspension and must apply for reinstatement.

But no one has been suspended in the NFL for spouse abuse or domestic violence, even though they’ve been arrested and convicted.

The NFL Players Association’s Upshaw said in a statement: “We believe the criminal conduct to which Mr. Vick has pled guilty today cannot be condoned under any circumstances.”

I say the NFL’s indifference to the acts of domestic violence by other players cannot be condoned under any circumstances.

Major League Baseball, meanwhile, isn’t any better in punishing spouse abusers.

Last summer, Philadelphia Phillies’ pitcher Brett Myers assaulted his wife on a public Boston street and was charged with assault and battery. Major League Baseball did not penalize him, shrugging it off as an off-field incident. Are they saying a player needs to abuse his spouse during a game to get sanctioned? If so, just how does that work?

Don’t expect anything better from the National Basketball Association.

Jason Kidd of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets pleaded guilty to spousal abuse in 2001.

Was he punished by the NBA? No.

The Sacramento Kings’ Ron Artest was suspended last season for 72 games for fighting in the stands. In March, he was arrested for domestic violence. For that he got what amounted to a hand slap; an immediate two-game suspension and a $600 fine for a player who makes several million a year.

Artest pleaded no contest to the domestic violence charge and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service, a 10-day work project and mandatory extensive counseling. The NBA did nothing here, either. Maybe if he had committed the transgression on national TV – as with the fan brawl – more would have happened.

Maybe if he’d hurt a dog he would have been benched for the season.

Sandy Kobrin is a regular contributor to Womensenews, where this commentary originally appeared.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/26/IN3ARO62U.DTL

This article appeared on page C – 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

That said, I’m saddened that Vick blew it so bad. I’m saddened that he didn’t lift a finger to help find the killers of any of the thousands of black men and women that were lynched. I’m saddened that he didn’t support the NAACP when times were good and he had not been found out as a criminal. I’m saddened by the fact that this country turned its back on thousands of black men and women in New Orleans before, during and after hurricane Katrina.

While Vick was training dogs to fight each other to the death, people were suffering from the devastation of hurricane Katrina, our troops were being killed in Iraq, and our government is tapping our phones without warrants. Those things sadden me a great deal.

Vick has not been part of the solution, he has been part of the problem. He is not part of the problem because he is black. He is part of the problem because he is rich and famous and has done nothing to help anyone in these situations.

You lament the fact that black men and women have been lynched and their killers remained free. I lament that as well. I lament too the fact that Michael Vick had just a touch of the brutal sickness of those same killers of black men and women and chose to take it out on dogs.

Anyone that hangs a living creature deserves scorn. Vick has not committed atrocities as bad as those that lynched black men and women in the United States or for that matter enslaved black men and women or killed off 90% of the Native Americans on 2 continents, but he was traveling down a path of sickness that was not too far removed.

People commenting here on this blog are almost universally saddened by this entire scandal for one reason or another. We are all taking action to do something about it or say something about it.

Michael Vick has done nothing but lie and work to save his job and fortune. I am impressed with the NAACP’s attempt to defend Michael Vick. I do not agree that Vick should be allowed back in the NFL, but the NAACP has some real heroes fighting for important issues, fighting for the elusive justice that you lament.

Michael Vick doesn’t deserve their support and that makes their support all the more heroic. I do hope that some day, Michael Vick will be able to achieve something in his life that will make him worthy of their support.

America does love a come back. The thing is that if Michael Vick comes back just as a football player, it is not a victory but a defeat. A hollow triumph to show young children like my son, that you can do evil things like hang living creatures and keep your fame and fortune and not sweat it.

The buck should have stopped a long time ago before those lynchings occurred. It did not and that is a historical travesty. But we each have to stand up at every small medium and large travesty and stop them one at a time ourselves otherwise they snow ball out of control and before you know it, some corporation like the East India company is enslaving a continent and shipping the slaves to another continent, some corporation like Wal-Mart is hooking people on the crack of cheap goods, produced by a new type of slave in China.

When the wheels of impersonal processes, corporations, tyranies, governments etc. get rolling, if individuals do not fight tooth and nail to stop them, the machine will roll right over the defenseless masses.

Vick not only participated from the machine, he profited from it and emulated it by creating a smaller gambling and racketeering machine of his own.

Now’s the time to stop being sad, stop lamenting about the past and start doing something about the present, start doing something to call bullshit when someone lies to you, when politicians deceive you, when corporations hook you on crack and your kids and your parents and your grandparents and your entire community, a crack called “the rollback”, now is the time to stop allowing more victims to suffer and stand up for what is right.

Vick was too much of a wimp too much of a coward to stand up and protect victims, protect the weak, instead he chose to create more victims gambling on dogs and taking money when a dog lived or died after being forced to chew each other to death.

Maybe,just maybe Vick will stop being a coward and hiding behind his lawyers and he will emerge from this a man. Maybe he will emerge to do some good and stand up against injustice. Maybe he will even help to track down some of those murderers or do some good to prevent murder and violence. That would be a positive thing and that is definitely something that could set him on a path to make up for what he has done, but more importantly set an example publicly for others to follow suit and inspire many many more people to take positive action instead of sitting around accepting a victimized fate at the hands of some faceless corporation or corrupt government.

Somehow I doubt if that will ever happen.

He did that for 5 years.

Raising a pit bull, and forgetting to secure it, allowing for the dog to get out, run down the street and get in a fight, kill another dog or maul a kid. That’s a mistake. Its often a tragedy too.

Raising dozens of dogs to train them to incite in them a blood lust to fight other dogs to the point that they are dangerous to themselves, to other dogs and in some cases kids they might run into in the future, and to repeat that for five years spending tens of thousands of dollars (over 20k on a single bet alone) not to mention the house, grounds, payroll for dog fighting trainers and more.

Michael Vick could have invested that money in charities, in working with hurricane Katrina victims (Atlanta has a very large population of Katrina refugees.) But no, he didn’t do anything like that.

he saved a nice place in his heart for killing animals.

That is sick. His race has nothing to do with it. Its just sick. Show me any person of any race that does this, and I’ll tell you that they are sick.

I was a Vick fan, a Falcons fan, I taught my son to watch football, watching Vick play. My son was taught to look up to a guy that for those same five years was running an illegal gambling operation based on fighting dogs to death.

I thought the guy had hero potential. I thought the guy could have been one of the greats. He had a lot of potential and a long way to go, but he didn’t just make a mistake. He made a choice every month, sometimes every week, to do what he did for five years.

A person might cheat on their spouse once and say its a mistake. A person goes out and cheats on their spouse every month for five years, that’s not a mistake. That’s a decision to be nasty to your spouse.

Michael Vick trying to sneak pot around through an airport, that’s a mistake. Flipping fans the finger during the stress of a game gone wrong. That’s a mistake.

This is beyond a mistake.

Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush gets up in front of a podium and says that mistakes were made in New Orleans and in Iraq, that’s just a line meant to fool people. They screwed up and people died for it. They did it on purpose or avoided taking the actions to save people or prevent torture. Not a mistake, a calculated decision to do what they did and screw the consequences.

Michael Vick is not the worst person in the world. But he did a lot more than make a mistake, he made a calculated decision to do something that he probably knew was wrong. He lied to the fans, he lied to the world, he lied to the NFL, and as bad he’s probably either been lying to himself. (If he wasn’t deceiving himself, then he’s psychotic and that’s a whole other can of worms.)

Personally, I don’t care what color Vick is – it seems to go hand and in
hand though that blacks like the pitbulls, which falls back to that stupid
rap and gangster music which has been the target of a lot of objections. He
wasn’t just sending dogs into the fight, but killing dogs outside the ring -
and who knows what other atrocities during training. Just this week
hundreds of kittens – about 6 week old kittens – were turned in or
confiscated from dog fighting rings. That isn’t because people who fight
dogs have a soft spot for kittens.

I’m irritated that poor dogs that have been domesticated to trust us
completely can be led to slaughter like that. Football players come a dime
a dozen hundred – why should we feel compelled to let poor mr vick bring
hours of enjoyment to fans all over the country! I’m not a fan of sports
and could care less who’s throwing a ball to whom… but it would make it
much more enjoyable to know that the players who have more money than sense
could actually try to do more good than harm. To have a social conscience.
And when/if they get caught w/ their hand in the cookie jar or shot while
partying in their limo, their families won’t have to worry about what truth
comes out later.

He knew what he was doing, he knew about the good behavior contract – he
made the choice. Why does the NAACP fight so hard for one wealthy black
person when they could help so many others who have so little.

I want a bumper sticker – I”M SICK OF VICK!