Thoughts On The Michael Vick Case

Recently, much attention has been focused on the case of Michael Vick, a professional football player who spearheaded a dogfighting ring. His cruel treatment of dogs outraged not only animal rights advocates, but the general public, the majority of whom consider dogfighting to be morally abhorrent. (A recent poll found that 81% of Americans considered dogfighting to be “America’s most hated sport.”) Although he has served a two-year prison sentence, many have called for him to be banned from professional football and perhaps receive other punishments such as a more extensive jail sentence, and have vowed to protest the Philadelphia Eagles and the NFL over his recent reinstatement in the NFL and hiring by the Philadelphia Eagles. It has been argued that his cruelty to animals was so far beyond the pale of civilized behavior that he is almost certainly a sociopath of some sort, and incapable of expressing genuine remorse or changing his ways. Since Vick was part of a dogfighting subculture in which such treatment of dogs is routine, the implication is that participation in dogfighting generally is a sign of serious mental disturbance.

In this blog entry, I will not attempt to diagnose Michael Vick’s condition, nor will I speculate on the likelihood that he can genuinely mend his ways. Even with far more detailed knowledge of someone’s life than I have of Michael Vick’s, diagnosing personality disorders is an undertaking fraught with difficulties even for trained mental health professionals (which, as a social rather than clinical psychologist, I cannot claim to be). And even if it can be conclusively established that Vick has exhibited “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others” since the age of 15, as called for by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria for antisocial personality disorder, the issue of whether such a condition can be successfully treated remains controversial among professional psychologists. Instead, my focus will be on the issue of how dogfighting fits into the general picture of humans’ treatment of nonhuman animals and of each other.

Although there is universal agreement among animal rights advocates that Michael Vick’s treatment of his dogs was horribly cruel and inhumane, there is considerable disagreement among them about the extent to which involvement in dogfighting should be regarded as an aberration in a society where cruelty to animals is so widespread that it is the norm rather than the exception. In an article provocatively titled: We Are All Michael Vick, Rutgers law professor and veteran animal rights activist Gary Francione points out that in the United States alone, more than 10 billion animals are killed for food annually, and that the typical treatment of these animals is every bit as cruel in terms of the amount of suffering inflicted upon them as the treatment endured by Michael Vick’s dogs. The vast majority of Americans eat animal products, and thereby support with their food purchases the very same sort of cruelty that the vast majority of them condemn in Michael Vick, despite the fact that it is not only unnecessary for humans to eat animal products, but actually healthier for them if they don’t. The inconsistency in attitudes toward different animal species is quite striking. Many Americans regard their dogs, cats, or other pets as family members, and an even larger number find practices such as dogfighting to be morally abhorrent, yet the vast majority feel little compunction about sticking a fork into the flesh of a pig, cow, chicken, or fish that they know perfectly well has been killed for the benefit of their taste buds. And, whereas dogfighting is not only widely condemned, but illegal in all 50 states, the abusive treatment of farm animals that is standard practice in animal agriculture is not similarly condemned, and is legal throughout the United States. Francione concludes: “Michael Vick may enjoy watching dogs fight. Someone else may find that repulsive but see nothing wrong with eating an animal who has had a life as full of pain and suffering as the lives of the fighting dogs. It's strange that we regard the latter as morally different from, and superior to, the former. How removed from the screaming crowd around the dog pit is the laughing group around the summer steak barbecue?...We are all Michael Vick.”

It is certainly true that the livestock industry treats animals every bit as cruelly as those involved in dogfighting treat dogs. And since at the very least, those who eat animals are generally well aware that the “meat” on their plate got there because an animal was slaughtered, they bear responsibility for those animals’ deaths.

Some animal advocates agree that just as much harm is inflicted on livestock as on fighting dogs, but nonetheless see involvement in dogfighting as distinct in many respects from the consumption of animal products. For one thing, it is argued, eating animal flesh and other animal products is almost universally accepted in our culture, whereas dogfighting is widely disdained, and therefore it should be universally understood that dogfighting is immoral. Secondly, it is argued that although they are undoubtedly aware that animals are slaughtered for food, few people who consume beef, dairy, fish, eggs, etc. understand the magnitude of suffering that animals raised for food undergo. Obviously, it is much harder to remain ignorant of animals' suffering when one is inflicting it face-to-face, as Michael Vick and other dog fighters do, and many would argue that being in a position to experience animals' suffering firsthand and choosing to do it anyway is a more reprehensible act than inflicting suffering at a distance. In fact, many would go further and say that Michael Vick or anyone else who engages in that level of cruelty to dogs face-to-face is a profoundly disturbed, amoral human being, a sociopath.

One objection that can be made to the first point is that it presumes that the cultural experience of everyone residing within a given country is the same. That presumption can reasonably be questioned. The Wikipedia entry on dogfighting notes: "Dog fighting has been popular in many countries throughout history and continues to be practiced both legally and illegally around the world. Dog fighting is widely practiced in much of Latin America, especially in Argentina, Peru and many parts of Brazil." It goes on to note that dogfighting was legal in the United States as recently as 100 years ago, and was even sanctioned by the American Kennel Club! Thus, not surprisingly, a dogfighting subculture persists in the United States. According to sociologist Rhonda Evans, who has studied this dogfighting subculture extensively, it is most prevalent among working-class Southern males. In her interviews with participants in dogfighting, Evans notes a common thread that is also present in other dogfighting cultures around the world: "A machismo mentality." In the American South, and many other cultures around the world, there is nothing more important to a man than protecting his honor. Unfortunately for animals, owning an animal that is good at fighting has become an important symbol of masculinity and means of protecting honor in many such cultures. "Tough dogs are a symbol of manhood," Evans argues, "and by winning, the dogs build up their owners' ego." Given dogfighting's important social function, Evans says, participants do not regard it as cruel, but rather as a "valid, legitimate sport that is no worse than boxing or football." In short, it is likely that participants in dogfighting, like those who hunt, fish, raise livestock, or eat animal products, do not generally believe they are doing anything wrong.

Certainly, it is true that aside from knowing that (since humans are not scavengers) their eating meat entails animals being slaughtered, many people remain largely or completely unaware of the suffering endured by animals raised for food. That was true in my case. I became a vegetarian (that is, I stopped eating animal flesh but continued to eat other animal products such as dairy) in the mid-’80s, primarily because I had read that it was better for health and the environment to eat lower on the “food chain,” and secondarily because I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with eating slaughtered animals. However, I remained largely in the dark about the way the livestock industry treated animals until several years later, when I read John Robbins’ book Diet for a New America. Upon learning of the horrors of livestock farming--branding, castration, and other painful procedures administered without anesthesia, the crowded and unsanitary conditions in which the animals typically lived, the separation of mothers and their offspring often within days of the latter’s birth, feeding of an unnatural diet to fatten animals up for slaughter (which generally takes place at a small fraction of an animal’s natural lifespan), the treatment of dairy cows as essentially milk machines for their entire lives, and on and on--I became vegan almost immediately.

However, by no means is ignorance of the treatment of animals the only reason why people continue to eat them. As with any culturally sanctioned practice, a variety of justifications for consumption of animal products have become part of the fabric of the culture, as has a tendency for people to avoid or distance themselves from the consequences for animals of consuming flesh or other animal products, and for society to make it easy for them to do so. Protection of the ego by any means necessary is a fundamental psychological process. We use euphemisms to refer to the dead animals on our plate: “Beef” instead of “cow meat”; “pork” instead of “pig meat,” etc. Slaughterhouses are generally situated in remote locations. Advertisements for animal products often display cartoonish, smiling animals, and imply that the animals raised for our consumption have happy lives. Some ads for animal products even depict animals as wanting to be killed and eaten! (The website www.suicidefood.com catalogs hundreds of ads of this nature.) Animals are continually portrayed as being inferior to humans in every imaginable way, and a favored way of describing people we don’t like is with animal names: “Rats,” “worms,” “beasts,” “pigs,” “vermin,” “insects,” etc. Obviously, regarding any being (whether human or not) as inferior to oneself makes it easier to inflict harm on it. I could go on, but you get the point: These sorts of ego defense tactics exist for a reason. We would not avail ourselves of them if there were not some pre-existing unease about the ways in which we use animals. As is often the case with other realms of life where defense mechanisms are used extensively, they serve the ego at a great price: Even when confronted with strong evidence that their continued consumption of animal products is harmful to themselves, the environment, and other animals, many people continue to be very reluctant to question or change what they are doing, because they manage to find ways to keep their unease at bay sufficiently to continue it.

However, one might object, eating animals involves cruelty at a distance -- in fact, many people are not aware of the treatment of farm animals in general, aside from knowing that they ultimately wind up in a slaughterhouse. Surely, someone who inflicts cruelty face-to-face as Michael Vick did must be a very sick person.

Psychological research, however, suggests that perfectly ordinary, average people are quite capable of inflicting cruelty face-to-face, given the right circumstances. In 1963, social psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to investigate the extent to which average, ordinary people were willing to inflict what they believed to be painful electric shocks on someone else purely because an experimenter ordered them to. What Milgram found was quite shocking: 28 of the 40 subjects in his initial study continued to follow the experimenter’s orders to supposedly inflict painful electric shocks all the way to the very end of the experiment, at which point the subjects had every reason to believe they were inflicting shocks that were not only painful, but quite possibly dangerous. Although subjects who were face-to-face with the person supposedly being shocked were less willing to obey the experimenter’s orders, nonetheless more than 20% of them obeyed the experimenter’s orders all the way to the most intense “shock.”

A similar study where the cover story, as in Milgram's experiments, was that the experiment was examining the effects of punishment on learning, investigated subjects' willingness to deliver electric shocks to a puppy. In this case, real shocks were delivered. Although not as intense as advertised, the shocks clearly caused the puppy pain. Yet, despite being able to see and hear the puppy suffer, 50% of the males and fully 100% of the females in this experiment administered shocks all the way to a supposed level of 450 volts. Although most were clearly upset by what they were ordered to do (as were Milgram's subjects), they did it anyway. In these and many other similar studies, a variety of situational factors contributed to the high level of obedience that was usually observed, most prominently the opportunity for subjects to use the excuse that the experimenter rather than themselves was responsible for the suffering that they themselves chose to inflict on the victim.

But one needn't delve into the experimental social psychology literature to find examples of perfectly ordinary, average people inflicting face-to-face cruelty on both human and nonhuman animals. Milgram's obedience research was inspired by his observation that millions of "good Germans," average, "normal" people, appeared to have participated in the Nazi Holocaust merely because they, like Hitler's right-hand man Adolph Eichmann, were "just following orders." Countless other tragic historical events can be described in a similar manner.

In the realm of more everyday events, millions of Americans hunt every year, and tens of millions go fishing. When I was a boy, I myself went fishing with my dad on a regular basis. Although I was a little uneasy as I watched fish struggle and suffocate, it never occurred to me just how terribly, terribly wrong what we were doing was. If my dad and millions of other people thought it was an okay thing to do, then as far as I was concerned it was an okay thing to do. What is or isn't socially normative, at least within one's own particular social circle, may be the ultimate situational factor. Indeed, in Milgram’s experiments, the presence of accomplices of the experimenter who displayed disobedience almost completely eliminated obedience, whereas the presence of accomplices who obeyed the experimenter without question increased an already high level of obedience by the real participants.

Whether one is involved in dogfighting, fishing, or eating animal products, the fact that one's friends, relatives, and neighbors engage in whatever the practice is without questioning it is the ultimate social force. What humans consider "normal" is largely defined by what people around them do. Thus, it doesn't make sense to judge another person's actions -- or their sanity -- in light of standards that may not be shared by that person's particular social milieu. Ultimately, the ethics of actions can only be judged by their intentionality, their motivations, and their consequences. By those standards, consumption of animal products fails the test of ethical acceptability just as miserably as dogfighting. Both are intentional, motivated purely by the pursuit of pleasure, and horribly cruel to the sentient beings on the receiving end.