Sick puppy

By now you have probably heard about the Michael Vick indictment. Vick, the quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, has been indicted on charges that he was running a dog-fighting operation from a home he owned in Virginia.

The details regarding the treatment of these animals are brutal, and I won't recount them here. Suffice it to say I was absolutely shocked to read the particulars of this story, and that someone with Vick's financial means would be involved. It smacks of the work of desperate (possibly brain-damaged) men, and the fact that it was committed for such relatively paltry stakes makes it that much more heinous. If you want to read about the details, you can go to this article from Sports Illustrated.

I've had some type of pet for most of my life, and reading about Vick's treatment of the dogs he procured for his side business leaves me saddened and sickened. Granted, he has yet to be convicted on the charges, but it is clear that what happened on that property was the work of a psychopath. So far there are three witnesses linking Vick to the crime.

My tendency is to believe the best of people; that, given a difficult situation, ultimately most individuals will find it within themselves to fight for the greater good. Our history demonstrates this time and time again (although it's probably true that our villains don't get the same amount of press). In the end, for the most part, I'd like to think that decency prevails.

Our world, our very existence, is a thin skin of biological material spread across what is (for the sake of brevity) a relatively tiny ball of rock we call the planet Earth. We are insignificant and yet wholly fascinating at the same time. We continually exceed our biological design, producing art, and architecture, and a culture completely beyond what any one individual is capable. We are unique among all species on our planet. Our growth as a civilization is often advanced by a single member. We have theories that explain our universe. The latest particle accelerators promise to reveal the fundamental particles upon which all other matter in the universe is built. M-Theory, although not widely accepted, proffers an explanation of our universe and the multi-verse on the grandest scale. The human race has evolved, and will continue to evolve. Eventually, we will colonize beyond our planet. The survival of our species depends on it, given that the Andromeda galaxy is on a collision course with our own (several billion years from now).

And ultimately, there's always a Michael Vick, or an OJ Simpson, or a Chris Benoit, to bring us back to earth, to show us that deep down we are all animals, and we can never escape that fundamental aspect of our existence. These guys are an aberration, a pox on our society, and they need to be eradicated. Yeah, eradicated - they are so far removed from all that we find acceptable that I think they should be neutralized from spreading their filth to society at large. I say we throw them all in a big cage and let them tear each other apart. And that we place bets on who is going to win. My money's on OJ, and when it's all said and done we can send him back to pariah-golfer status in Florida and put the rest of them down.