[…] the author’s attempt at comparing the well-being of a five-year-old to a stupid game of football is not only retarded, but insulting to his readers’ collective intelligence.

… which explicitly states that, in my opinion, your argument is retarded. If you see that as a personal attack toward your person, as opposed to an attack on your argument, then I believe that is what some would call a persecution complex.

Goes to show that one need not be versed in the field of critical thinking to acquire an array of academic titles. Again: sad.

“I condemn the NFL for reinstating Vick, because it is a universal truth that animal abusers derive great pleasure from playing football, and not because I simply despise the guy based on my own moral convictions. I deleted that guy’s comment because it contained offensive name-calling, and not because I simply refuse to have people contradict me in my own blog.”

In both cases, your opinion should stand on its own, and is more than enough to validate your actions. But in both cases, you feel obligated to justify your actions in some higher court of public opinion by painting it not about a personal choice, but as an upholding and protection of some mythical universal moral truth.

That is just sad.

If you are at all interested, here it is: http://sub.agarzola.com/misaligned-retribution/

Thanks!

To clarify, I acknowledge that people kill animals. I’ve eaten more than my share of meat during my life. Like I said, I’m not going to get preachy there. As such, no, I’m not going to go so far as to say that anyone who intentionally harms animals is necessarily evil and should be punished. If you hunt for food, that’s part of the natural order. If there are too many predators and there isn’t enough meat to go around, well, mother nature has a solution for that too. Hell, if the Alfred Packard situation was as he described it, then, yes, I think he was right to eat his fellow travelers and would have been right to kill at least one if that was the line that separated the living from the not-so-much.

To further clarify, I think you could make a compelling argument to suggest that the concept of survival be extended far enough to vouch for limited animal testing of products. I’m not going to get holier than thou on this one either though I think this one is stretching it. I tried to use a deodorant for a month that wasn’t tested on animals. I broke out in a rash and was itching my arm pits for weeks. The deodorant I use now was tested on animals. I wish it hadn’t been. I would have been content to use my body as a laboratory on that one, but it is what it is. Is it possible to acknowledge something’s value without necessarily agreeing with it?

Anyway, let’s get to it. Where I’m going with this is that what makes Michael Vick lower than ambulance chasers and lower than Texas congressmen who pretend global warming isn’t happening is that he wasn’t fighting dogs for sustenance. He wasn’t doing this under any pretense that could have posed for animal testing. He wasn’t doing this for any reason beyond his cheap, sadistic entertainment. He was doing this because he had absolutely zero respect for animal life and loved to watch these poor creatures beat the hell out of each other. Between he and his fellow criminals, hell, this was better than talking about the big game at the water cooler. As far as he was concerned, this was adult male bonding at its finest.

Furthermore, he got off on pounding the losers to death. In the same way a rapist rapes — not out of sexual frustration — but to establish a sense of superiority over the victim, Michael Vick beat these dogs to death because he needed to do so to prove to himself in some fleeting way that he, unlike them, wasn’t a loser.

When you value your vanity or your entertainment over another living thing, yeah, I think your life isn’t worth the spunk it took to spawn it. Yeah, I think you forfeit any right to incredulity and had better accept whatever fate comes your way. There’s a not-so fine line between people who make mistakes and people who make choices. Vick made his and the state of Virginia and the NFL are also culpable in their mishandling of the situation. As far as they’re concerned, the Beaver lied about his homework, and now that he’s had a night to think about it, we can all agree he’s learned his lesson and let’s all get past this in time for the next episode.

So, since we’re putting this on a spectrum, where does Michael Vick’s fate lay? What is fair punishment? On a scale of zero to a hundred, with zero being absolutely clear of conscience and one-hundred being a deep french kiss with Beelzebub, where do you put the following?

1) the insufferable vegan who would rather practice cursive on his wrist with a straight razor than sneeze at a rabbit?

2) Pol Pot, Hitler, Goebbels, et al.

3) John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy

4) Joe Six-Pack who got drunk one night and DWI-ed a mother and her kids in a station wagon

5) “Fanciful Farms”: the non-existent dairy farm where “we only milk cows that want to be milked and we go out into the field to do it!”

6) The ringleader and executioner at an animal fight club

7) Proctor & Gamble – where anything with fur should spend six months with Head & Shoulders in their eyes so we can make sure its safe for people!

Rupture Farms – the factory farm that reminds you of the classroom scene from Pink Floyd’s _The Wall_

9) The fearless deer hunter who hunts purely for sport

10) The exec who does a quick bit of math and decides that doing nothing and paying out accidental death claims is cheaper than recalling his product.

It sounds like that’s not what you intended, but I’m reasonably sure I’m not alone in interpreting what you wrote toward the end of your post in that fashion. I took Mike’s responses to be along those lines, and a number of comments at some of the social networking/news sites suggested that others interpreted your post that way as well.

There are those who make a radical argument that would equate torturing an innocent animal for fun with research. Again, I’m pretty sure I’m not one of them. There are certainly types of animal research I’d ban if I could – cosmetics, for instance – but that’s as far as I’m going.

What Vick did (and what others like him do) is sub-human. That’s what I said and that’s the context I’m addressing. I certainly encourage you to do a post on why that’s not the same thing as research, though. I’m just not sure I’m in love with the idea of THIS thread being put to that use. Doing so distracts and undercuts the impact of what I’m trying to do.

I don’t think you realize how hard a line you just took. You’ve essentially made the argument that it’s inhuman to intentionally harm animals. And that’s an argument that PETA makes all the time in the process of resisting life-saving medical research using animals that, for example, have their backs broken to test spinal regeneration therapies.

So I’ll ask you point blank – is it sub-human, lacking in empathy, to intentionally injure animals to advance human medical knowledge and/or training? Would you change you mind knowing that most medical schools in the U.S. used to teach anatomy by vivisecting a sedated dog (that was later killed), and that as of 12 years ago only about 50% of medical schools had abandoned the “dog lab” in favor of manufactured simulators?

Dick Butkus once said “I wouldn’t ever set out to hurt anyone deliberately unless it was, you know, important — like a league game or something.” And it’s funny because it’s true. In football, which is the national sport and something like the state religion in the South, the aggressive, the merciless, and the strong are rewarded, and the only time anyone is sorry about breaking rules is when they get caught.

This is the culture Michael Vick comes from. He was throwing a football at three and weight training at 13. Of course, there were disciplinary problems at school, but he made varsity as a freshman, so all was forgiven. Violence has been not so much accepted as rewarded prodigiously in his life. Is it really surprising that he has grown indifferent to suffering? I can see certain parallels between the training and competition of these dogs and the training and competition of football players. Although they don’t kill football players who sustain career ending injuries, yet…

Josh

It’s like arguing over who was worse, Hitler or Stalin. Well, if you’re killing people the way they were and for the reasons they were, the point of no return arrives several million corpses before you can start comparing resumes.

If you enjoy purely academic arguments, knock yourselves out. But let’s make sure we get some perspective up front. This is energy wasted on each other when there’s not enough actual, meaningful point of disagreement, in the larger context, to even notice. Our energies are better spent examining those who commit atrocities against both people AND innocent animals.

Don’t get me wrong – animal welfare matters. But when it comes to animals vs. people, I’ll happily and unremorsefully choose people 80% of the time. It makes me much happier knowing that my drugs were tested on transgenic mice, rats, and monkeys before human trials, for example.

And those other 20% of cases, when I choose supporting the Northern Spotted Owl over loggers, for example, I also vote and spend in ways that support the logger communities that are affected.

Jeff

Trying. I’m a vegetarian and I’m trying to get the last bits of cheese out of my diet.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say I’m a meat eater. Let’s go even further and say, damn it, I can’t call it a meal until I’ve had a pit bull steak. What then? Does that put me on the level of someone who fights dogs and tortures them to death? Would it have lessened his crime in your eyes if they had sent the dead off to a meat-packing plant?

Yep, animals are killed every day. Predators are part of a healthy ecosystem. If a person says “hey, I like eating meat; primates are omnivores”, I can accept that argument. Everything in the animal kingdom has to eat. It’s not for me anymore, but I’m not going to get preachy about it. If you say “hey, dairy animals may have it worse than meat animals”, I’d say “you’re probably right and that’s why I’m trying to cut out dairy as well”.