Sick the Dogs on Their Premises

By Joseph Kellard

I've heard news reports with reaction from other professionalathletes regarding the Michael Vick case. Some of these athletes'comments appear to draw a moral equivalence between hunting and Vick's staging of dog fights and killing the inadequate canines.

While I'm no fan of hunting and could never kill an animal unless it attacked me with the intent to seriously harm or kill me, I recognizethat there are distinct purposes and motivations for killing animals, some entirely moral and others wholly irrational.

Staging dog fights is sadistic, and its participants get a nihilistic "pleasure" from watching animals rip each other apart and kill for the sake of its brutality. As if this weren't horrible enough, Vick killed some of these dogs' employing some gruesome methods. These actions lead me to believe that people like Vick are potentially a step away from murdering people.

Thus, morally, Vick should be roundly condemned for his irrational motives and his horrible treatment of these dogs. But the same cannot be said of the average hunter, assuming his purposes are the challenge of the hunt, the use of the deer, bear, etc., for food, clothing and rugs, etc. So while there is one group of people that want to destroy these distinctions to morally justify Vicks actions, there are others who condemn these people and me who also want to destroy these distinction to promote "animal rights."

"Dog fighting is cruelty to animals and should be against the law," they argue. And these are not necessarily your vegetarian, PETA activists, but your everyday Joe who has no problem cooking up hamburgers at his next barbeque.

PETA and their sympathizers want to destroy the moral distinctions and purposes as to why people kill animals, so that they can proceed to destroy the relevant political distinction, that is, that human beings have rights and animals don't. This allows them to go on to champion these laws against dog fighting and other acts of cruelty to animals, based on the irrational premise that animals have "rights."

Lastly, what's equally disturbing is how people describe Vick's disgraceful actions as a "mistake," which can be packaged with actions such as leaving a bar of soap on the floor of a bath tub, and how others say that Americans are "a forgiving people" and that in America "everyone deserves a second chance," as if forgiveness is required whether or not Vick shows in action that he has changed for the better.


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Copyright © 2007 Joseph Kellard