ESPN.com: A History of Mistrust (Vick related)

[techboy]

I've said this before, but you guys are really missing the point about why dog fighting is so abhorrent.

It is not because dogfighting kills dogs.

As noted by several, there are other situations where our society kills dogs, including thousands every year in shelters, simply because they cannot find homes. No one blinks at this, and rightly so. They are just animals.

No, the problem with dogfighting, and what makes it worthy of prosecution in my book, is the torture.

In order to make the dogs effective fighters, they are tortured unmericifully. They are fed gunpoweder. They are beaten with sticks. They are mistreated.

And, when the time comes to put down the poor fighters, they are hung, or electrocuted, or otherwise killed for the enjoyment of others.

I'm sorry, guys, but to equate this horror to hunting, or the circus, or horse racing, or slaughterhouses, is total and complete crap.

In those cases, animals certainly die. Sometimes, as in the case of non-free range chickens, they suffer.

However, the suffering in these cases is not intentional, but rather a byproduct of another goal.

In the case of non-free range chickens, for instance, the awful conditions allow many more chickens to be raised much cheaper, allowing farmers to keep their prices down, which has the benefecial side effect of allowing the poor to more easily afford meat.

Farmers do not sit around devising new and creative ways to make their chickens suffer, and they do not make a show of the slaughter.

Again, the problem is not the suffering or the killing, per se, but the deliberate torture.

There's only one modern comparison to dog fighting, and that's bull-fighting, and guess what? Lots of people oppose it, and we don't do it here.

Animal cruelty is a big deal. It's not about what it does to the animals. It's about what it does to people. It's dehumanizing. It hurts the soul. Study after study has linked animal cruelty to serial killers. It is sick.

Is that the kind of behavior anyone here really wants to minimize, or make legal?

Really?

P.S. It's not about race. The emotionalism and hyperventialiton in this case comes from our society's love of dogs, which I will agree should not be a factor.