In Which I Embrace the Death Penalty After All
Steve Verdon reads the Michael Vick indictment so I can preserve a saving distance from it, and informs us that as part of running his dog-fighting business,
Vick and his codefendants killed no less than 8 dogs that either lost fights or failed fight tests. The method of killing ranged from electrocution, drowning, hanging to slamming a dog’s body to the ground until dead.
As Verdon writes, “The methods of killing these poor dogs seem to have been selected to inflict the most pain and distress possible.”
Mother. Fuckers.
A dog is a great big furry ball of trust, even a dog that has been trained into meanness and savagery. To traduce that trust is unforgiveable. It is inhuman.
(No, I wouldn’t really execute Michael Vick out of all the Earth’s criminals. My principles aren’t so easily discarded. I would not electrocute him. Or drown him. Or hang him. Or slam his body to the ground until he died. There are in fact a thousand ways I would not kill him. I will now spend some time composing a list for myself, just to make sure I’ve thought of them all. Mother. Fuckers.)
Comment by Jess Nevins —
July 17, 2007 @ 9:17 pm
I’m no fan of the death penalty myself. Nor (tempting fantasy though it is, for the right criminal) of maiming and what’s-done-to-you-is-what-you-did revenge punishment.
But crimes like this certainly deserve a more severe punishment than simple imprisonment and shaming. A pity we as a society don’t have one.
Comment by Karen —
July 17, 2007 @ 10:19 pm
I totally agree. I read somewhere that most serial killers start out by killing animals, so there is some scientific basis for imposing stiff sentences for animal cruelty. This at least deserves as much prison time as writing a hot check or sale of a dime bag of marijuana.
Comment by Dave Trowbridge —
July 17, 2007 @ 10:56 pm
Dante must have overlooked the special circle in Hell for people like Vick.
Comment by chris y —
July 18, 2007 @ 4:45 am
Banishment would fit the bill. Throw them over the border without a passport and without any consular access. They could spend the rest of their lives begging donuts from tourists in an airport interchange lounge in Port au Prince, because no country would let them though immigration.
Bastards.
Comment by solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short —
July 18, 2007 @ 7:08 am
Karen, that’s the utilitarian argument for slapping the crap out of kids who torture frogs (which I’m for, and don’t take your rings off first), but animal cruelty laws aren’t meant to deter violence against humans–they’re meant to punish animal cruelty. Suffering’s suffering, maybe more so if you don’t have abstract thought to take the edge off.
Hey, who wants to hear me use this news as a way to launch into a rant about factory farming?
Aw, c’mon. I got my annual smugness booster and everything.
Comment by Eric Martin —
July 18, 2007 @ 9:15 am
Mother. Fuckers.
Yup.
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
July 18, 2007 @ 11:44 am
I don’t see the difference between crushing a dog’s head for losing a fight and crushing a cow’s head to make a steak. The animal is dead either way.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
July 18, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
Last Christmas, my wife gave me a wonderful calendar called “Forgotten English.” The Forgotten English of the day for yesterday was “faleste,” in which the prisoner is bound and then left on the beach at low tide. I thought it sounded horrible at the time – I still do – but after reading the above I think it wouldn’t be horrible enough.
.
Joshua – that depends on how you crush the skull. You can crush it slowly, so as to inflict maximum fear and pain and to prolong the agony, or you can shoot a bolt straight into the brain so as to cause near-instantaneous death. There is a difference, and your apparent inability to discern it disturbs me. (And there are arguments to be made against carnivory, but you’re not making one of them.)
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
July 18, 2007 @ 1:52 pm
There is a difference, but is it worse to hurt an animal than to kill it? If not, then why is killing cows for food okay and killing dogs for failure not?
As for arguments against carnivory, there are none I remotely respect.
Comment by Vache Folle —
July 18, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
How about mauled and eaten by dogs? Wouldn’t that be an ironic punsihment? Of course, we’d want it to be an accident, say his plane crashes in Africa amid a pack of wild dogs.
Comment by Eric Martin —
July 18, 2007 @ 4:55 pm
There is a difference, but is it worse to hurt an animal than to kill it?
Wrong question. The question is: if you’re going to kill an animal, should you do it with wanton cruelty, or in as quick and painless a process as reasonably possible.
Comment by r@d@r —
July 18, 2007 @ 5:55 pm
at the very least these guys need jobs picking up pet poop for the city for the next 10, maybe 20 years.
Comment by Father Figure —
July 22, 2007 @ 8:40 am
This is the kind of behavior that warrants lifetime solitary confinement, with almost total sensory deprivation. Let Vick spend a long period of time with himself; its the worst punishment imaginable. Joshua, fighting dogs are tortured for their (brief) entire lives. They have much worse lives that the animals who reside on corporatist farms. Your second comment indicates that you actually find the torture of dogs acceptable, so its probably pointless to discuss this with you. Go back to the PNAC convention, or whatever rock you crawled out from.