It tells you a lot about the moral condition of a people to notice what they get angry about and what they merely laugh at. E.g.,
You can write comedies about abortion but cannot laugh about killing animals.
You can ridicule religion but not racial differences.
You can joke about sex but must be angry about smoking.
You can laugh at dumb dads but not dumb blondes.
Would be worth making a longer list, but even this much tells you whether you are in a culture of truth or a culture of nihilism.
As far as Mr. Vick is concerned, in a better culture than we have, there would be a proportion such as: dogs:human children::the crime of placing money on dogfights:the crime of accepting money to kill children.
Um, I hate to go all disproportionate on everyone here, but I think there's something deeper going on. Animal abuse, and I mean proactive cruelty to animals, not just leaving a dog tied up in the backyard all day without adequate fresh water, but real non-laziness cruelty, is nearly always a sign of psychopathic tendencies. People who go on to be serial killers always start out doing horrible things to animals, and it takes a psychopath to enjoy doing that sort of thing. All the psychology stuff is fairly recent, but I think people have always known subconsciously (and even consciously: eg a man that beats his horse will beat his wife) that someone who is so utterly horrid to animals has something deeply wrong with them, and they're just reacting to that.
Fair enough. It's still interesting to me that stabbing two humans to death didn't draw half so much outrage.
I agree too. What's worst about animal abusers' gratuitous cruelty is that it points to cruelty to human beings...clearly something far worse (which is why people always denounce "treating people like animals," or even "being brutal"). And that's my point. If animal abuse is monstrous, how much more monstrous is the human abuse it points to?
Incidentally, you can find an understanding of the psychology (formerly known as vice or bad habit) of animal cruelty back in the masterpiece of the Jewish Thomas Aquinas, Rabbi Moses Maimonides in his "Guide for the Perplexed" and I believe even in essays by Plutarch. The whole Western tradition used to understand that kindness to animal creation was "humane" precisely because it strengthened kindness toward "humankind" and the opposite was equally true.
The only trouble with the Vick story as it is being presented is that it seems to point to the demand to treat animals "humanely" but not human beings.
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