Michael Vick is Still a Dog

I hope that whatever Michael Vick is paying for his image rehabilitation gurus isn’t coming out of the money he’s supposed to be giving for the rehabilitation of the dogs he tortured. The former NFL star went on 60 Minutes to tell the world that he hates jail.

Oh, he also loves animals now. And Jesus. That’s right Mike: Jesus, puppies and football are good, jail, lying and torture are bad. Could I get some apple pie with that?

From a media standpoint, the problem with Michael Vick’s televised efforts is that he totally oversold the point. Nobody believes that Michael Vick “loves” animals. Saul wouldn’t have believed that Michael Vick loved animals if Vick had a falling-off-a-horse religious conversion right there on camera. People who love animals are simply incapable of beating, drowning, electrocuting, and eventually shooting animals.

Vick should have been counseled to go for a more conservative revelation. Something like “I realize that I had no right to torture these animals.” Or “I should protect things that are weaker than me, not exploit therm.” You know, something that could have passed for a basic sense of humanity that he doesn’t have, instead of an emotion that he is incapable of feeling.

But even the best media consultants couldn’t have convinced me to give Michael Vick a second chance. I simply reject the premise that poor black youths and poor white youths are preternaturally disposed to beat on animals. Unfortunately, that was what Michael Vick was trying to sell on 60 Minutes, and that is what his supporters have been trying to sell since his crimes came to light.

I’m not buying it. Let’s go to the recorded evidence after the jump.

Vick didn’t have a direct answer for “why” he committed the crimes he did. Evidently, “because I’m a sick bastard” didn’t test well with focus groups. But there was the subtle implication that the socioeconomic situation of his youth contributed to his desire to murderously torture animals. When asked directly by James Brown about why he killed dogs, Vick had this eloquent way of putting it:

I know why. I know why. And regardless of what it was and why I was driven by what was going on — you know whether it was because of the competition or whatever it may have been — it was wrong.

I liked that speech better the first time I heard it when it went something like this:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And, sure, he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason.

The point Vick the Visigoth was trying to make was that there was a powerful culture of dog beating that he was raised with and he wasn’t strong enough to break out of it.

Shockingly, Vick had someone with actual credibility on hand to carry some of that cultural water for him. Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the Humane Society, was by Vick’s side. Pacelle was there doing the difficult work of trying to make the best out of a bad situation:

If we just punish Mike indefinitely and don’t pivot to this problem in the communities where kids are victimizing these dogs and then going down a dead end street themselves — because there are no heroic dog fighters — we will not being doing our job. And I felt we needed to get involved and we needed to do some creative things to reach these kids.

Mr. Pacelle is clearly right that dog fighting is an epidemic that must be stamped out. And he’s right that you need to start working the problem with children. I don’t fault Pacelle for trying to see if anything good can come out of the horrible deeds of Michael Vick.

Image by BL1961 via Flickr

But the message Pacelle wants those kids to hear can’t simply be: “don’t fight dogs, because you could ruin your chances at a respectable career and even go to jail!”

Oooh scary. That’s working so well with the drug war, why not try the same strategy with a totally unconvincing, overrated football player who is just saying it to give the Philadelphia Eagles some cover for their morally bankrupt decision.

Quite frankly, most people aren’t born with the desire to torture and kill animals. The few that are are called sociopaths. Those kids, the kids that really get off on this sort of stuff, need to be identified and given the psychological help they need. Get them while they are young before they move up the food chain to neighbors and enemies.

For everybody else, sure one can be socialized to enjoy the bloodletting (sick though it may be). And history has clearly taught us that man will bet on anything. I’m sure that if I was raised in a different culture, watching grown men beat on each other until one of them loses his fight with gravity for ten seconds would be sickening instead of basically entertaining. So if we are really going to go after the system that allows the few bastard dog-fighters to get their rocks off, then we have to change the culture.

I fail to see how Michael Vick is in any way helpful to that effort. Not when he is unable or unwilling to identify the “whatever it may have been” that made him think dog fighting was okay in the first place. Not when all he can do in front of children is recite Old MacDonald’s Farm like he did in Atlanta last weekend:

I encourage all of you to love your animals. Whatever animals you have, whether its a dog, a cat … a reptile, a horse. I encourage you to love that animal dearly …

It’s not about loving animals, Mr. Vick. The bar is much lower than that. It’s about respecting the basic dignity and power of life itself. Even a dog instinctively gets that.