Don't let Vick off the hook

I want to explain how animal lovers feel about Michael Vick.

Vick's story is not a metaphor, like “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see, did it really fall?” It is a story cleansed of the details that make it real.

Stolen house pets spent their last minutes alive afraid, shrieking in pain, defecating and urinating in fear, dying terribly torn to shreds by dogs trained to fight. Losing fighting dogs were nailed to fences, or wet down and electrocuted with batteries.

Normal human beings do not inflict pain on animals for their entertainment. Normal human beings have empathy for humans or animals in pain. Don't tell us this is a “cultural thing.” It's plainly not. People all over the South have dogs as pets and hunting dogs but eschew this type of wanton cruelty.

What does it take to watch a stolen house pet torn apart by a fighting dog? No conscience? No empathy? What does it take to develop a conscience, or empathy? Will 18 months in prison grow a conscience? If that's the case, why does prison fail to create empathy and a conscience in so many other prisoners?

Animal lovers are pragmatists; and we believe if you truncate an individual's million-dollar athletic career, they will be all about a second chance and redemption. But for the scores of dogs that died so miserably, when is their second chance?

Society is right to be wary of people who think torture and pain are entertainment spectacles. It's such a short, fine line to finding pain in humans entertaining, too. And your analogy about the wisdom of marrying a known wife beater is off the mark. The wife-beater's second fiancee would be making a choice ... the murdered dogs were given no choice.

Of course, an all-loving and forgiving God will show compassion to Michael Vick. In the meantime, I say we should keep an eye on him and advise Michael Vick to get an aquarium (and no fighting fish!)

Anita Mitchell

Sugar Grove