News-Record.com

Don't get me wrong. I love my leather jacket, cowboy boots and bacon cheeseburgers.

There is no small chance I'm giving up any of them to join PETA, listen to Earth Crisis and live on Tofuti Cuties. I wouldn't suggest you should, either.

But I think it's worth asking why we're so tender hearted when it comes to our pets and so liaise fare when it comes to the livestock.

Is our disgust with dogfighting about the horrible, humiliating, awful way in which these animals die...or is it that it's for entertainment rather than food or fashion? Is our disgust with people who could possibly treat animals this way...or is it that we don't know (and don't want to know) how awfully animals raised for food and clothing are treated and in what horrible ways they're killed?

When I was in high school I had a lot of vegetarian friends. A few were always trying to convert me. One day one of them gave me a book (and accompanying video) -- I wish I could remember the name of it now -- about the reality of how animals are slaughtered in America to make our Big Macs and sausage biscuits. If I could read this book with an open mind and still want to eat meat, she told me, then she would never bother me about it again.

So I read the book. And I was horrified by it. The way in which these animals were bred, kept and slaughtered was indeed awful -- in many cases far surpassing the cruelty of the dog fights I've seen (in documentaries, not first-hand). I agreed that these practices were humans valuing animal life only as a means of producing food, flashy clothing and heated leather seats for luxury cars. No way around that conclusion.

And when I'd finished the book I had a Whopper.

I didn't do this because, as Morrissey recently suggested, all meat-eaters hate animals.

I did it because, like most Americans, I can separate out and dismiss the cruelty we practice on animals for food by telling myself that I need the food. I probably don't -- or in at best I need a lot less of it than they produce and I consume and what I do need could be produced in ways that are less cruel.

I can even separate out and dismiss the cruelty we practice on animals to make my leather loafers and that brown leather jacket that always makes me feel a bit like Indiana Jones. And why? Because I need these things? No. I certainly don't. But I want them and, when I don't have to think about it too much or be confronted with the cost in animal life and animal pain, I conclude that those lives and that pain are less important than my being able to wear these great shoes -- and at such a reasonable price.

Which is why I think the Michael Vick case is interesting.

I don't think we really, in our heart of hearts, hate Michael Vick for killing animals or treating them cruelly. Because if we're honest with ourselves we know that we all participate in and benefit from industries and practices that do this all the time. The animals are not as cute, cuddly and (in theory) domesticated as dogs. We don't have to do it ourselves. But that's small comfort to the animals.The killing floor is not really less cruel than a dogfight and the hogs and cows we raise in captivity, pump full of chemicals, antibiotics and hormones, assault and unceremoniously slaughter because we need or want to are no less dead than the dogs in Vick's fights. Or, if we believe that the fighting was even crueler than our cruelest industrial animal practices because it lasted longer and was not regulated, we have to at least acknowledge that it's a sliding scale of anal electrocution, gassing, suffocation, beheading and injury along which none of us would like to see our own beloved pets who we for some reason value more highly than our livestock. None of it is anything in which we'd like to actually participate.

No, I think we hate Michael Vick (and people who engage in dogfighting generally) because they enjoy it. Rather than blocking it out the way you and I do so that we can enjoy our pork chops, leather chaps and sex harnesses without considering their true cost these people look that cost in the eye -- they watch the animals suffer and die -- and they find it entertaining. For them the death of animals is not an unfortunate (but thankfully off-stage) by-product of a necessary industry. It's something they do actively for a good time.

You'll get no argument from me in saying that's a sick, sad, sociopathic thing. What sort of maniac does it take to live with that kind of cruelty and enjoy it?

Why can't he simply ignore that cruelty while benefiting from it, like the rest of us?