So what’s your point? We know a dog is not the same a a human. We know he was already arrested and all that jazz.
So what? Suddenly it’s a bad thing that I still don’t like him? It’s a bad thing that some people don’t want to be associated with him or spend their money on games he might be in?
I don’t care how “sorry” he says he is, I don’t care if he wants to resume his previous career. Let him, if he can, but it is not owed to him, any more than it is owed to anyone else. Hell, I don’t care if he claims to have changed. That claim goes around a lot too. A lot of people pay their entire lives for a lot less.
Star status and entitlement don’t mean much to me.
I initially felt this way as well. From what I understand, when a dog is injured in a dogfight, bringing that dog for treatment to the vet will rouse the suspicion of the police. Hell, in that case, I’d kill the animal too rather than seek treatment from a vet. The wise thing to do is to implement a new law that allows people to take in injured animals to the vet or shelter without the fear of prosecution.
I don’t have any qualms about Vick’s sentence and hope that he’s prohibited from having another animal in his care, but I do think the media circus revolving around his illegal activities are misplaced and inflated. We care about more about some fucking, buried dead dogs than we do about the half-million dead people in Darfur.
Michael Vick looked at his dogs as useless for companions. He viewed them as battle bots and used them as such.
right, and pitbulls are just naturally designed to be vicious and mean. Greyhounds just happen to be insanely fast. Mankind and dogs were ordained by nature to be together.
no, we bred dogs from the beginning. First we bred docile dogs with docile dogs to foster domesticality. Then we branched out from there. hunting dogs, herding dogs, toy dogs, racing dogs, fighting dogs, etc. There’s nothing symbiotic about it. A dog would be a lot worse off without people than people would be without dogs.
Right, so if I breed pigs and get it into my head that giving them a good beating with a bat with nails in it, gets their ‘fear juices’ going and makes for a better pork chop, I should be completely within my rights to do so? Or do I just need to qualify my idea with a bit of research first? Once I ‘prove’ it does what I say it does, do I have an obligation to my customers to give them the best pig meat?
No, they are sometimes bred by mean people. If the dog was properly socialised from day one, it would be just as likely to be a threat as any other dog.
We didn’t breed dogs from the beginning. Or are you gonna cite me?
That’s a value-judgement that a lot of people, not just dog owners, would disagree with.
No, I find that perfectly reasonable. I just don’t think he should be banned by the league for life. If no one wants to hire him, fine. If someone is leaning towards hiring him but won’t because of public opinion, fine. But I don’t believe he should be prevented from trying since he has completed his sentence.
Vick is a jackass that wanted to play at being a thug, but all this howling and teeth gnashing about his being a mentally disturbed sociopath or suffering from some other mental aberration says more about the tender sensibilities of modernity than it does about his mental fitness. For better or worse setting animals at one another has been human sport since the dawn of human society. It’s only in the last hundred to two hundred years or so that it’s become frowned upon as a sport.
Compassion for animals exists for a relatively select cadre of animals and some are definitely more equal than other in terms of where we focus our outrage at their mistreatment. This is not to excuse Vick as his behavior is at odds with the law of the land and he got deservedly nailed , but trying to tag him as nuts for fighting animals is asinine.
um, beat away? while you’re at it, you’re allowed to take baby cows and stuff them in a box and force feed corn down their throats until all 4 stomachs explode and market it as veal.
Then i guess being naturally aggressive to the point that you can’t be insured against it is just a sweeping generalization and an indictment on the owners and not the pets? If I go out and buy a nile croc and keep them in my backyard and I get chomped to bits, it’s my fault because i couldn’t naturally socialize the croc?
really. i can’t think of a single person outside of maybe sheepherders that could legitimately say that their quality of life would be worse than their dogs if the relationship was severed.
I have a a dog. her name is molly. i think that between molly and me, we both know that if I were to kick her out tomorrow and not regularly feed/water her anymore she’d be screwed. If not screwed, she’d be hard pressed to fend for herself, hunting down food, or finding heating vents to nap over. I, on the other hand would be sad for a little bit but would probably be able to keep on living.
We have a lot of laws dealing with the mistreatment of animals. That would indicate that as a society we value animals and think they should be treated properly. People who do not recognize the proper treatment of animals and do cruel things to them face the law. They are the aberrant personalities. Our society sees people who are cruel to animals as dangerous and perverted. Kids who are cruel to animals often escalate into cruelty to people.
Many people will not be able to think well of Vick again. He enjoyed cruelty .
I think the point of contention isn’t cruelty to animals but the severity of the punishment. Nobody is condoning the abuse of animals, its just should a man
a) be imprisoned for animal cruelty (and/or the financing thereof)
b) wrt the OP - be banned from the NFL after being imprisoned
He did the jail time. Either he gets banned or he doesn’t. If he does get banned, fine. If he doesn’t fine. I’m not going to cry for him if he gets banned forever.
WHY is he so damn important? If he were some unknown, a nobody in some little town, nobody would give a damn if he got a second chance or not.
Oh. He’s a sports guy, a celebrity. One of those special people.
The lifting of the ban will be a financial decision. If a team feels he wont hurt the gate and can help the team ,he will get another chance. If they think picketing will be huge and fans will not renew seasons tickets, he will not get back in. We can argue morality of animal cruelty forever, but money will be the deciding factor.
Not really, it could mean that during those 90,000 years, we really were existing together on a “you scratch my back…” basis. Then, at a very late stage in the game, we deliberately started trying to influence the kind of dogs we had hanging out with us.
This is a meme. There are lots of other players on lots of other teams with far more serious crimes than keeping Chris Henry employed. Remember the Chargers? Kiel arrested on federal drug charges, Steve Foley being shot by police, Shawn Merriman suspended for steroids…let’s face it here, Cincinnati had a run of mostly minor arrests in 2006, and the only reason people continue to believe that the Bengals employ any more criminals than any other team is because they are historically a shitty franchise and thus easy prey for the butt of jokes.
Horse crap. Commonly repeated horse crap, but horse crap nonetheless. By that standard, YOU care more about posting on a message board than about the half-million dead people in Darfur, since you posted but didn’t save Darfur.
Or breakfast. Or reading this. Or putting on your shoes. Or every single thing you’ve done since Darfur came to your attention.
Many, many people who view Michael Vick’s crimes as severe are also active in protesting Darfur. And the problem is the same – weak laws and a tendency to not seriously defend the downtrodden. Plus, we’ll have to kill people to stop the genocide in Darfur, which makes it icky.