Civilization has relied on the exploitation of animals

A couple of days ago, a dear friend sent me an e-mail aboutMichael Vick. This sweet, kind, gentle grandmother said that Vickshould be hung up by his ... well, let's just say "toes."

Columnists and talk show hosts have attacked Vick with adjectiveslike "repugnant," "reprehensible" and "despicable." And an Internetsearch for "Michael Vick" plus nearly any imaginable epithetproduces many thousands of hits, including 178,000 for a mild onelike "jerk."

All this venom is well deserved. Vick now admits his involvementin dogfighting, a practice that easily justifies words like"despicable."

Nevertheless, some writers, including me, have expressed a twingeof discomfort over this vigorous attack on Vick when ourcivilization has depended upon the exploitation of animals formillennia, and for most of that time their welfare was only anafterthought.

In fact, we've hunted, killed, confined, castrated, fattened,branded, butchered and eaten them. We've slit their throats tosacrifice them to our gods. We've bred them for our amusement, andwe have a long tradition of fighting them or inducing them to fighteach other for our entertainment. Many countries still do.

In our enlightened country, we've outlawed bullfights, cockfightsand dogfights, although illegal versions of the last two are stillcommon. We experiment on animals to find cures for our own diseases.We confine them in factory farms under miserable conditions and theneat them.

We take them into our homes as pets, often neglect and abandonthem, then euthanize about 4 million every year. And we confine themin circuses and marine mammal exhibits under the pretense of"education," when, really, the goal is amusement and profit.

If we're uncertain about the safety of coal mines, we send incanaries; if space travel seems too dangerous, we send up a chimp.

In short, since we've built our culture by thoroughly exploitingthe dominion over animals bequeathed to us in the biblical story ofcreation, why are we suddenly coming down so hard on Vick?

There's a poignant scene in "Jarhead," the movie made fromAnthony Swofford's account of his experiences during the first GulfWar. In a break from the task of kicking Saddam Hussein out ofKuwait, some Marines -- typical American boys -- stage a raucousbattle between two enormous Arabian desert scorpions and thentorment them until one stings the other to death. Money is exchangedover the outcome.

I suspect that the audience is supposed to have a complicatedresponse to this scene, but it's not hard to imagine that howsomeone like Michael Vick, bred in a culture that gives only lipservice to the dignity and welfare of animals and raised in themacho violence of football, might see it.

Nevertheless, in the interest of preserving whatever progresswe've made in animal welfare, he's got to be punished. I was talkingabout this with my English-teaching colleague, Bill Pugh, who saidthat he knew the perfect punishment for Vick: Send him to prison fora couple of years and require him to participate -- under very closesupervision -- in one of a growing number of programs that useprisoners to train dogs to provide assistance to the blind, deaf andelderly.

At first I thought that this would be like sentencing a childpredator to learn how to work in a child-care center. But everyoneseems to benefit from programs like these, including the dogs thatlearn to do surprisingly beneficial tasks for the disabled, as wellas provide companionship.

And it appears that the prisoners benefit, as well. Some of thembecame prisoners in the first place because they never had the goodfortune to experience any sort of real connection with anotherliving creature.

Participants in programs like these have a good record ofrehabilitation in prison and low recidivism once they get out.

Dogs, of course, are champions of a kind of loyalty, forgiveness,and devotion that may be more than Vick actually deserves.Nevertheless, I like to hope that nearly every human being has acore of decency worth salvaging.

If Vick has one, no creature is more likely to find it than adog.

John M. Crisp teaches in the English department at Del MarCollege in Corpus Christi, Texas.