Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Michael Vick and the timelessness of brutality

In a world where children’s hands are hacked off with machetes and bombs are detonated in marketplaces, where young women are burned alive as punishment for affairs of the heart, civilization clearly remains a work in progress. Our aspirations are shadowed by the stubborn brutality of the human animal, which, it seems, cannot be tamed and can only be kept at bay.

One notable success: the rise of regulated athletic competition to take the place of blood sport as mass entertainment. In Rome at the height of its imperial glory, gladiators by the thousands fought to the death before cheering crowds. They hacked one another with swords; they were torn to pieces by wild animals. Most of them perished in near anonymity, but some became idols and sex symbols–men such as Celadus the Thracian, immortalized as “the young girls’ heartthrob,” and Crescens, “the netter of young girls by night.”

Michael Vick, an NFL quarterback, battled the Bears and the Lions rather than actual bears and lions–a seemingly simple step up in terms of civilization but one for which Vick ought to have been deeply thankful. Along with his “netting” license, he stood to gain $100 million or more. He risked sprains and bruises instead of severed arteries and a crushed skull. His career might be measured in decades rather than hours.

But Vick’s dogs were not so lucky. On Aug. 20 he agreed to plead guilty to federal charges stemming from his involvement in the blood sport of dogfighting. There are additional allegations that he shot, hanged and electrocuted dogs that lost. He faces prison, the loss of millions and maybe even the end of his career.

A number of people have argued that the punishment is far too harsh, given that pit bulls have been bred over several centuries to fight and that, after all, these are just dogs in a world where worse cruelties are suffered by humans. And why should a killer of dogs go to prison while butchers of hogs go to the fair?

All good points. Perfect consistency may be too much to expect, however, from our veneer of civilization. The Vick case isn’t about children or farming; it is about suffering and death as entertainment. A modern gladiator, of all people, ought to know what’s wrong with that.