North Star Writers Group

Without him, the team is terrible, and with him, the team can never be great. He’s a wonderful athlete who dominates little more than the highlight reel. Truth be told, I seriously doubt the Falcons would have ever succeeded with Vick at the helm.

As far as I’m concerned, the dog-fighting scandal was one of the best things that could have happened to the Falcons. They had to get rid of him somehow, even if they didn’t want to accept it. Michael Vick had a special appeal with the culture of Atlanta, which everyone knows but very few people admit. He was a champion, of sorts, for one half of the segregated South. He sold huge amounts of tickets and jerseys, and had one of the largest, most loyal followings of anyone in the NFL. I think Vick almost literally had to be wrested out of the Falcons’ hands in order for them to part with him. As it turned out, he was arrested out of their hands, which worked out just as effectively.

If the same situation were to happen to Donovan McNabb, Peyton Manning, or LaDainian Tomlinson, the story would have an entirely different importance. Their teams need them. Vick’s case is different. The Falcons need a real, NFL offense. This is not so much a sports story as it is a story for American pop culture.

But concerning the scandal itself, should Vick really do prison time? Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m assured that his crimes are heinous and ghastly, abhorrent and despicable, or to most effectively sum it up, inhumane. I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I thought inhumane meant “not human,” or more specifically, “not having qualities befitting humans.” This is one thing I can’t understand about the Humane Society. Dogs are not people, and yet we’ve taken a term whose root is as obvious as any word in the English language and made it somehow applicable to another species entirely. This is going well beyond anthropomorphizing. We’ve altered a word’s meaning entirely, which usually means something has gone awry.

Personally, I think it might be best if dog fighters were fined and caned. But prison seems inappropriate. If Vick were sponsoring pigeon fights, for instance, the public response would be a bit different. However, since you’ll never see someone taking a pigeon for a walk, or hand-stitching their pigeon a fire-truck-red winter sweater, the situation is completely different. We think dogs have deep feelings to which we can relate. We talk about our pets as though they were family members. And thus, when dogs get treated cruelly, or like animals, some might even say, we react quite passionately.

Quite frankly, I’m not quite sure what I think of all this, at least from a legal perspective. If someone were to harm Kudo, my childhood pet, I probably would have felt quite justified taking my little league aluminum bat to his forehead. And to take even another shameless step back, I wanted to be a veterinarian for a very long time, until I realized this required good grades in classes I preferred to neglect.

I love dogs. But dogs are not people, and although some of the actions Vick is accused of make most of us cringe, I’m not sure this merits taking away his freedom for years to come. The one thing about which I am sure is that people tend towards judgment long before they have a sound case. The court of public opinion is most certainly a beast of a legal system.

The NFL has reacted quickly and severely, suspending him indefinitely without pay, which I’m convinced has little to do with justice, and everything to do with saving face. He may never again do what he loves, and he may never again feel comfortable, or even safe, in public. Michael Vick’s life is changed forever. And although I’m happy for the Falcons, I do not feel wonderful about what has happened to their former hero. Granted, it’s hard to feel sorry for a man accused of drowning and strangling pit bulls. But especially if the man ends up in jail for even a year, he’ll have my compassion.

The tragic truth is that, in a culture that is so quick to judge, the media does a lot more than take a news story and report it to the people. It takes a man like Michael Vick and throws him to the wolves.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column # NS070. Request permission to publish here.