of the National Football League. Michael Vick is a highly paid
athlete-entertainer whom the Atalanta Falcons and various corporations
that sell wildly overpriced sneakers and other sports paraphernalia to
an American and global youth market pay large royalties to advertise
their goods.
Michael Vick has been indicted in Virginia for using some of his money
to train and fight dogs, which is a criminal act in the U.S. along with
being a profoundly sociopathic enterprise that dehumanizes human beings
by having them cheer for and profit from animals trained to murder each
other. As a major part of the indictment, Vick is accused of directing
and participating in the sadistic murder of a number of dogs whose
fighting "skills" were considered inadequate, by hanging, electrocution
and other grotesque means.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane Society
have denounced the action and the Humane Society has called upon
concerned citizens to contact the National Football League to demand
Vick's suspension. I would urge our readers to do so.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centur1es the struggle for animal
welfare and animal rights had many prominent socialists in its
vanguard, from Henry Salt(British author of the pioneering Animal Rights
in 1892) Jack London, and Upton Sinclair more than a century ago, to the
longtime left activist Henry Spira who organized campaigns against
animal experimentation and brutal treatment of animals by corporations
ranging from Revlon and Proctor and Gamble to MacDonald's. Sociologists
have also long made connections between the sociopaths abuse of animals
and anti-social behavior against humans. The thinking of largely numbers
of people everywhere who are part of the broad left, those who detest
exploitation and oppression for any reason, through the world resonates
with the animal rights/animal welfare movements, which are peoples
movements opposed to the exploitation, oppression, and destruction of
animals for personal and corporate profit or sport.
Michael Vick should be suspended immediately by the NFL and suspended
for life if he is found guilty, or if it is clear that the preponderance
of evidence shows that he played a significant role in these criminal acts.
In 1920, Chicago White Sox ball players were suspended from baseball
for life for taking money to fix the 1919 World Series because of the
threat it represented to baseball's integrity as a game(the players
involved were, relative to what they were earning for their owner at
the time, very poorly paid and subject to petty harassments by
management that made them prey to gamblers). Pete Rose was banned from
baseball and has been barred from the membership in Baseball's Hall of
Fame(which on merit he richly earned) for gambling on games(including
those that his team was involved in) when he was a manager a generation
ago, charges that he has mostly denied and continues to deny, again for
the integrity of baseball. Recently a few NFL players who been
suspended from the league for periods of time for bar fights, illegal
weapons possession, and similar acts.
Michael Vick should be suspended immediately and if the evidence
support its permanently, for he is guilty of far worse crimes, not
against the NFL but society. He has participated in a degraded and
degrading activity which brutalizes all who participate in it. Whether
he has done this because of his own personal pathology or to show off in
this sordid world, the way wealthy aristocrats sponsored cock fighting
and other animal blood sports as gambling enterprises for their peers
and spectacles for those lower classes, is not of any great importance.
He certainly doesn't need the money. And society can't tolerate such
conduct.
For Further information on the case and the general issue, see
https://community.hsus.org/CampaignUS 2007 dogfighting nfl2 the Humane
Society website
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