I’ve been thinking about the difference between playing professional football and dogfighting.
The three main differences I see are:
A beefy guy with enough speed and strength can make the choice to try and become a pro football player. The dog has no choice.
When the game is over the football player may be beat all to hell, but trainers and doctors stitch him up. If the dog loses, he’s killed. Even if he wins a few times, the dog gets pretty well chewed up, and quickly, too.
Retired pro football players live, on average, to their early 50s. (That’s about age 7-8, in dog years.) Some of them live long enough to testify in Congress and tell pitiful stories of how beat up their bodies are from playing pro football.
Not much attention is paid to health care or vet bills for the dogs. For the few “lucky” dogs who get rescued, there is the humane society and probably euthanasia.
Those are the main differences I see — leaving out money, fame, mansions, and all of that.
What Michael Vick and/or his friends have done makes me mad. Mad for the helpless dogs forced to fight for their lives. It also reminds me of the brutality of football, and how maimed and wasted the players often are — but at least they have a choice.
Since I saw the photos of the dogs, in my darker moments I’ve wondered how long the NFL would last if football outcomes were determined like Roman gladiator combat. Where, at the finish, their lives hung on whether the audience’s thumbs pointed up or down.
Vick will be tried and if the evidence really is overwhelming, I can see America’s thumb pointing pretty much down for his career. Unlike the dogs, he’ll escape with his life and his money.
But it would be nice if some of that money were given to humane societies.
I once heard former NFL linebacker Matt Hazeltine speak in San Francisco, in the early 80s, and met him afterward. Very nice guy. In his speech he talked about how he couldn’t do regular push-ups any more. He described all the leg and joint injuries he had, his spine injuries, the range of motion he had lost.
It was cool for me, in my mid 20s at the time, to meet a guy I had watched play football, and for four of us to sit down and have a drink together. But the stunner came when he talked about what he wished he could do. He said he wished he could write. He wished he could describe things the way writers do. I don’t think I mentioned to him that as a twelve year old I wanted to be an NFL linebacker, but I sure thought it, at the time — the irony hit me like, well, a blitzing linebacker.
Matt Hazeltine passed away in 1987.
Football seems so barbarous to me now. A colleague told me that what really turned him off to football was hearing a couple announcers during a game discussing, without a trace of irony, how the defensive game plan was to injure the quarterback. It’s part of the game, now. And much of why I no longer watch.
But it’s not hard for me to imagine how playing football could lead someone to fighting dogs. How a guy could feel a natural connection between those worlds. Live it Sunday afternoon, be a spectator Sunday night.
It’s all kind of sad, really. I liked Matt Hazeltine, and wish he had lived longer and that he felt more comfortable writing.
I also wish the dogs were able to speak up for what they wanted, too.
It’s more than just football. This is a societal issue: http://www.unboundedition.com/content/view/1676/50/
In reply to ricky, I don’t think what Michael Vick is accused of is in any way comparable to eating meat.
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Rickytickytimbo (nice name, btw), I agree with Whig, here. I think there’s a pretty big difference between eating meat and cruelly pitting animals against each other in a fight usually to the death as a form of entertainment.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for cruelty to animals for nutrition. I’m married to a vegetarian, who is vegetarian primarily over the cruelty issue. I go out of my way for free range and organic for myself. We pay more for local produce to reduce the carbon footprint, etc., etc.
But to take this a bit more global, carnivores throughout the wild do pretty cruel things for food, yeah? Wolves maim large prey then track it for miles, waiting for it to weaken to kill it off. Leopard seals, long after fed, will continue to kill penguins for fun. I could go on, but the point is, God, the gods, the creator, whatever you want to call it, set up a pretty cruel system that had creatures devouring each other long before we ever developed forelobes or forks and knives.
Doesn’t it feel, at a certain point, like you’re shaking your fist at the creator?
One of Barbara Kingsolver’s characters comes to that realization in the poisonwood bible. All animals kill in order to live.
A — do you know where that is? I’d like to pull it down off the shelf and take a peek.
(But it’s a big book and I understand if hard to track down the page no.)
Heh. It was a bit hard to track down, Ben, mostly cus the book isn’t in my posession anymore. However, since it’s for you…
I did manage to find the quote I was thinking of on the internet, and even the page #. Woowoo. Here ya go:
“On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope’s shadow passes over the startled grass. And we, even if we had no meat or grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”
page 347
It’s sad that anyone would ever choose to treat any animal like that, let alone a dog, an animal we all know to share a very special bond with the people they co-habitate with. Growing up, I was taught that you’re pets should be considered as equals with any other member of your family. Period. And growing up, maybe I was sheltered, but I never got exposed to this level of curelty. I cannot fathom what lies inside one’s soul to do this to any creature, let alone one many consider to be extended family.
Whatever Vick gets in retribution for this, it certainly will not be enough.
Wow, A, thanks for the search. Hadn’t meant to trouble you; thought that with that young and flexible brain of yours you might know where it was.
As a bonus there’s remembering the stuff about quinine, so crucial to that story. As tough a read as it is, this may be one of her most interesting books, for me.
Am curious to hear/read more about her latest, too. Re local food.
Jeff, I was a bit surprised to see how much of the Sunday SF Chronicle as devoted to this issue.
It seems that, as so often happens, an isolated issue triggers a much larger reaction, as if a critical mass has been achieved. I mean, the story was big, but it’s spawned such a large, diverses reaction, including a Chronicle columnist tying it in to the running of the bulls, a dog accident in the Tour de France, and the burrowing owls who once lived near the SF 49ers’ HQ (?!?!?)
Amng other articles, the Opinions section had a wonderful piece on the very topic you address.
PET CAUSES
Pampered more than ever and largely defenseless, critters subject to cruelty at hands of humans draw more sympathy than, well, people
There was even an article about a controversy over Hemingway’s cats.
The “Pet Causes” piece, by Vicki Haddock, an “Insight” section staff writer, was fairly chilling in the way it tied cruelty to animals practiced by kids to later violence toward people.
She writes of the lack of empathy displayed by these kids. She then ties it in to people like the cannibal Jeffery Dahmer, John Wilkes Booth (who strangled cats), and to mass murderers.
“Perusing the backgrounds of murderers, robbers and sexual assailants, [the researcher] discovered that 56 percent of violent offenders had committed animal abuse, mutilation and torture …”
MIDLAND, July/August 2000 – on May 21 in the 61st through 64th paragraphs of a 76-paragraph NEW YORK TIMES feature on the childhood of Republican candidate for U.S. president George W. Bush: ‘We were terrible to animals,’ he recalled, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. ‘Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them… Or we´d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.’
The quotes are evidently from a Terry Throckmorton.
Oof, Whig, that explains so much.
I can see the connection. Violence begets violence. If smashing things is your lifestyle ….
Dogs are amazing creatures. I didn’t have one growing up, I had to wait until my 20s. She was my companion through very bad times. The idea these creatures fighting each other for vicarious thrills revolts me.
All animals kill in order to live
Yup, especially in order to eat.
Do you think Michael Vick was feeding himself?
Я смотрю вас здесь уже заспамили
bbizbor,
as Paul Newhart would say, “sa- same to you, fellah!”
Michael Vick deseves prison.
Petrosof, what’s “deseved”? Anyway, we all come from meat eaters, don’t we?
nichollof, you idiot, dog-fighting is not about eating meat, it’s just cruel.