(FWIW, in some ways I'm more comfortable with eating the venison from my brother and nephew's deer hunting than with ordinary beef, pork, and chicken from the grocery store, because I figure the deer lived a natural and happy life until David or Eric shot it, unlike the factory-farmed animal.)

I am with Susan on this.

Great article, brenda. Thank you.

Torture may occur in hunting. A shot that wounds without killing, for example. But it generally isn't the point of hunting the way it is with dogfighting.

I can't criticize hunting for food. Eating is a pretty necessary activity. Hunting for trophies seems more morally questionable to me.

And to follow a thread Aimee started, White might think about efforts to make dogfighting and hunting equally legal or illegal.

One of my goals for when we get through our present financial bottleneck is to start buying all our meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products from some of the local organic, grass-fed, free-range farms. I figure it's more humane for the animals and healthier for us--but the cost is such we can't make the switch right away. (I know, I know, we could become vegetarians, but so far my guilt/squick over factory farming practices hasn't quite reached that threshold.)

They're not remotely the same thing, and dog fighting has consequences that go beyond the extreme cruelty of it.

That's why the RICO charges (which he avoided with his plea) were so interesting.

It took an NFL player involved to do it (maybe it HAS happened before?), but with RICO law enforcement could decimate dog fighting like they did the mob. (If they felt like it, which they might now).

I think there is a fair argument to be made that they haven't because it only involved populations they consider beneath their notice -- just a bunch of "thugs". It would be interesting to see dog fighting do to gangs what tax evasion did to the mob.

And to follow a thread Aimee started, White might think about efforts to make dogfighting and hunting equally legal or illegal.

Yeah. I mean, to bring it back to Ray Lewis, you see people saying that it's a travesty for Vick to be going to prison and getting so much neg press when Lewis didn't even miss a [real] game.

Well, no. The travesty was the Ray Lewis part, not the Vick.

Even seasoned law enforcement agents are consistently appalled by the atrocities that they encounter before, during, and after dog fights, yet the children that grow up exposed to it are conditioned to believe that the violence is normal. Those children are systematically desensitized to the suffering, and ultimately become criminalized.

I had some pretty shocking conversations along these lines when I volunteered 'in the big house.' One of the inmates (who was in for murder, not dog fighting, though he had run a book for a ring somewhere in MD) talked about how expendable his 3 year old daughter was.

I asked how he would feel if his little girl got caught up in the things he'd done (crack not the least of them). His reply? "Then she'll die. Everybody dies."

His reply? "Then she'll die. Everybody dies."

He's not wrong, she sighed cynically and sadly.

I've helped my dad butcher deer that we ended up eating. That is nothing compared to the images I saw on Real Sports in their expose on dogfighting--which included a family pet that had its back hip smashed before being tossed into the ring as "bait" so it wouldn't injure the pitbull too badly.

Killing an animal for food is acceptable to me. Laughing, smiling and waging bets as two animals rip each other apart is just beyond sick.

I am Cashmere's righteous indignation.

Everyone is already saying everything I might have said, only more wisely and briefly, so I'm just going to sit here nodding. And loathing dogfighting, and hoping that this whole fucked-up mess helps bring the whole foul enterprise down. The pleasure in violence and bloodsport, the cruelty to the dogs, the occasional theft of other people's small dogs and cats and kittens to teach the big dogs to kill -- there's nothing about it that isn't pure evil.

Not as evil as arranging the murder of your pregnant girlfriend, but, really, "less unspeakably vile and disgraceful to the entire human race" still isn't much of an endorsement.