I don't think Michael Vick should have spent a day in prison. Needless to say, I think what he did to those dogs was horrific and he should have paid some penalty for it. But I'll tell you why I don't think he should have spent a minute in prison.
We are a society that eats animals. Not by the thousands. Not by the millions. Not by the tens of millions. BUT BY THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS EACH YEAR! We use cows, for example, to give us what is arguably the most complete, perfect food -- milk, just like from our own mothers -- and then as a reward for nourishing us, we bring her to a slaughterhouse, at the end of her usefulness as a reservoir of milk, where we first subject her cerebral cortex to a jolt of electricity from a prod in order to brain-kill her and then proceed to cut off her head, chop her up into little pieces, mince her, and then proceed to eat her in the next day's Big Mac. HOW IS THAT ANY LESS BARBARIC THAN WHAT MICHAEL VICK DID TO THOSE DOGS????? At least he wasn't a hypocrite about it and butchered the poor animals with by his own hand. We, on the other hand, consume our meats neatly laid out before us without any clue as to the torture and vileness that we had subjected the animal to both during and at the end of its life. I actually have more respect for hunters who hunt and kill deer or whatever because at least those animals had a life in the wild before they were killed. And the hunter actually gets down and does the dirty work of both killing and, often, cutting the animal up (although the butchering is usually left to a professional). But in over 98% of the cases, the hunter and his family eat the animal they have killed.
