For Vick and his advisers, this alone was something of a breakthrough, even without a guarantee that it would amount to anything. Judy knew that if Vick helped the cause of animal protection, he might face an easier pathway after he left Leavenworth. He was about to reenter society, and the Vick camp did not want us to pick up where we left off prior to his incarceration. If we demanded an extension of his NFL suspension, and perhaps organized protests at football stadiums around the country or did letter-writing campaigns to team owners and their sponsors, it might make him even more radioactive and doom his comeback. The man was a professional football player who wanted to resume his career, and he had a steep public-relations climb to get there.
Michael Vick and the Contradiction of Cruelty
WHEN WE SPOKE THAT first time, Vick underplayed his professional self-interest in joining the animal-protection cause, much as I expected. “I deserve exactly what I got for what I did,” he told me in the Leavenworth courtyard, blinking into the sunlight. “Some of the guys in here said I shouldn’t have had to serve this kind of time for something like fighting dogs and that it wasn’t a serious crime. I told them they were wrong—that they had no idea what I did and that I am here because of stupid things I did.”
He said it had been no picnic on the inside. The food was bad, the dollar-an-hour work monotonous, and the prison’s management stern. Since NFL players have famously short careers—an average of fewer than four years because of injuries and competition—it must have felt like extra punishment for Vick to lose two years in his prime. He could never reclaim those years, and with this lengthy separation from football and the damage to his image, he had to wonder if he’d ever be able to resume a successful career. Few athletes at the highest level of competition in any sport ever pick up where they left off after such a long interruption. Football had been Vick’s way out of poverty, and the case had not only cost him his career and reputation, but also left him bankrupt.
On the day we met, Michael was dressed in the standard-issue drab brown body suit, just like the other inmates. He looked fit and powerful even in that loose-fitting attire, and I could immediately see how he came to be known as the most exciting athlete in pro football—a hybrid, new to the NFL, of a strong-armed quarterback with the legs and moves of a running back.
Prison had not broken his spirit, Michael assured me, and it had been a learning experience. “I am a better person now,” he said. “My future is still ahead of me. I’ve learned a lot, and I am ready to step back into society.
“I did terrible things to animals, and I am sorry about it,” Michael continued. “Animal cruelty is wrong, and in the future, I want to be part of the solution, and not part of the problem. I want to work against dogfighting and animal cruelty. I love animals.”
I NEEDED TO HEAR an apology and an admission from him that he had done terrible things—with no hint of an excuse for his conduct. But the kicker in his statement—about loving animals—well, that was too much for me.
Why would he tell that to me, of all people? As he said it, I could only think about the U.S. attorney’s indictment and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s investigative summary, and the accounts of what he and his Bad Newz buddies did to the dogs.
“Michael, you did horrible things to animals, and no one who ‘loves’ animals could do such things,” I replied. “Your past behavior and that sentiment just don’t square. That’s not something you can say on the outside if you hope to win back people’s trust.”
“I know what you mean, Wayne,” he answered. “But I really do love animals. And for the life of me, I can’t understand still today why I did these things.”
Although I knew that any public expression by Michael Vick that he loved animals would only make matters worse, I let him go on, trying to figure out how the guy’s mind worked. Here you had a man who did merciless things to animals but still harbored the self-assessment that he’d always loved animals. It was a common refrain I had heard from animal fighters, so it wasn’t a complete shock to hear it.
“What do you mean when you say, ‘you love animals’?”
“I have always loved dogs, always wanted them around.”
“But what about the dogs you fought? You didn’t treat them like loved ones.”
“They were like gladiators. So strong, so fast, and powerful. And they didn’t make any noise,” he said, in searching for the words to prove his point.
“You mean, they weren’t like German shepherds or other dogs who would snarl, growl, and bark when they fought.”
“Right. They were completely quiet during the fights.”
At this point, I was resisting the impulse to lecture him. I was here to make a preliminary determination about Vick aiding our anti-dogfighting efforts. But I am an advocate at heart and thought this could be something of a teaching moment.
“So you were fascinated by them. You admired them, in terms of their strength and courage.”
“Yeah.”
“Mike, I think that’s admiration, in some narrow sense. But that’s not love. You don’t hurt somebody or some animal you love. You may be drawn to animals and you may have an interest in them. But love’s more than admiration and fascination. It’s about care and affection.”
During my dealings with animal fighters, they had often talked about how much they loved the animals. They spoke of the animals’ physical attributes, and their strength and valor, just as Vick did. The professional fighters clearly did admire the animals—they were, to a great degree, a central component of the lives of these men. They spent hours a day with them—training and conditioning them, feeding them a special diet, and just enjoying watching them. They built intimate relationships with these animals, even as they subjected them to lives of fear, injury, and torture.
This way of thinking among animal fighters reminded me of the same mind-set I’d come across elsewhere, in the self-justifications I’d heard before. Duck hunters, though a much more “highbrow” and educated lot than animal fighters, came to mind as I thought about what Michael Vick had said. These men may rise before four A.M. to get to their duck blinds well before sunrise, then stand in the freezing cold and call ducks for hours—in order to bag their daily limit. The unoffending victims are flying with their mates when suddenly they are hit with metal ammunition that must seem to come out of nowhere. The pellets pierce the ducks’ bodies, but often don’t kill them immediately, leaving them in pain and fear as they struggle to stay in the air. If the shot doesn’t kill them, then the birds die when they slam into the ground, or when a hunting dog or a hunter finishes them off.
So many duck hunters I’ve known talk incessantly about ducks, maintain wood carvings of ducks in their homes or offices as decorative items, and mount painting of ducks on the walls. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service runs an annual duck stamp art contest—and often it is hunters who create the most stunning artwork. Ducks enchant them, and they perceive something glorious in these creatures that eludes even the most ardent animal lovers. They would be the first to tell you that they feel a bond and a special appreciation for ducks, and I have wondered at times if their effort to protect breeding grounds is a form of penance for the harm they do, as well as an effort to perpetuate the killing.
Of course, duck hunting as a sport is legal, the killing is commonplace, and the hunter stands at a distance, while animal fighting is illegal and underground, and the animal’s suffering is seen at close range. But something about Vick’s rationale sounded very familiar. He was one of many people who abused animals while telling themselves they loved them.
I didn’t want to hammer away at this contradiction too forcefully with Vick. I wasn’t his psychologist, and I am not sure I could untangle the problem anyway. He clearly didn’t understand what was going on in his head either—he was still trying to figure it out for himself. So we moved on to other questions.
“Well, Mike,” I said, “I am going to have to get to know you better before making any judgme
nt about whether you can be involved in our anti-dogfighting work. But let me say that, even if I can find a way to get comfortable with you working with us, I would not want you to simply appear in a Public Service Announcement or in a few media reports where you talk about the issue. That’s too easy, and you wouldn’t reach the right audience anyway. I think you need to demonstrate commitment and to invest some serious time in the program.”
“Okay, what did you have in mind?” he asked.
“We are concerned about the growth in street fighting in urban communities around the country. We’ve started programs with former dogfighters and gang members and they talk to at-risk kids on the streets and try to steer them away from involvement in dog-fighting. They are mostly African American kids, but a person of any race or ethnic background can be involved. PSAs on television or radio would never reach these kids, but our on-the-ground programs do.”
“That sounds really good. I like working with kids, and think I can make a difference.”
“But, Mike, I am worried you’ll forget about us when you get hired by a team and when everything gets back to normal. You won’t feel the pressure to stick with it.”
“No, I won’t forget. This is what I want to do. I’ll get a day off a week during the season, and I can do stuff against dogfighting on that day. Then there’s off-season when I’ll have plenty of time.”
“I am talking two or three years, Mike. I am talking about a commitment to this program.”
“I am into it for the long haul. I want to fight cruelty to animals for the rest of my life. When I am done with football, I want to be a wildlife conservation officer and have a refuge for abandoned wild animals.”
Here he goes again with his love of animals, I thought. Despite my interest in moving on, I couldn’t help but spend a few minutes with him on this, too.
“Mike, what do you mean, you want a refuge for abandoned animals?”
“I would like to run a place where I can have animals in a sanctuary. I had pet birds. I love watching the Discovery Channel and nature shows.”
He was either trying to con me, had gone completely insane, or had more nuance to his emotions than I had assumed. I was beginning to think that maybe Michael did feel a real bond with animals, even if it had been twisted and corrupted into something ugly and merciless.
“Mike, I need some full disclosure, especially if we are going to consider giving you any sort of connection with the HSUS, if you are doing a community service sort of program. The HSUS is the nation’s leading animal-welfare charity, and there are obvious risks for us in working with a convicted felon and animal abuser. People hate what you did, and they’re still very angry. So I need to know the worst things you did to animals, and I need to know the scope of your involvement in dogfighting.”
Vick took a deep breath and replied, “I’ve been involved with dogfighting for a long time. I wasn’t just financing dogfighting. I was involved in the actual fighting itself.”
“What about the reports of culling. All true?”
“Yes, true. The worst thing I did was that I drowned dogs. But I never electrocuted any dog. That’s not true.”
“How did you drown a dog?” I asked.
“I had a bucket of water and I put his head under.”
“Did he struggle?”
“Yeah, he was struggling.” Vick looked down as he recalled the scene, but he spoke in the tone of a man telling the truth.
“I look back, and I can’t believe I did these things,” he continued. “You know, man, I was just about out of this. I was thinking I had to get out of this situation. I knew dogfighting was wrong, and that it was no longer the thing for me. I just didn’t have the strength to get out of it. Then, just a week later, the police showed up.”
There’s really no telling what Vick might or might not have done had law enforcement not arrived to limit his options. Nor was I entirely convinced that this was real remorse I was hearing, and not just a very impressive act. He looked penitent now, but this is the same man who with his own hands had drowned a dog struggling for his own life, and taken pleasure in watching other dogs tear each other up. This man had been right on the scene, up close and personal. In any case, in the weeks ahead, I would have to decide whether HSUS should have anything whatever to do with him.
I told Mike I’d think about our conversation and get back to him with our answer. We stood up and headed back into the visitor’s lounge to let Judy know we were done. She walked out to see him, leaving me and Mike’s fiancée, Kijafa, to wait in the drab little visitor’s room.
Kijafa was clearly relieved that this would be her final visit to Leavenworth, and I asked her if she really thought Mike would abandon dogfighting for good. She said he definitely was done with that, and she wouldn’t stick around if she ever suspected otherwise. I didn’t ask her how much she had known before the raid on their house, though throughout the trial that question had hung in the air.
Kijafa asked me what HSUS did. She mentioned that she had watched a segment of the Oprah Winfrey Show about puppy mills and she was surprised to see how badly the dogs were treated. I had been one of the guests that day on the show, and I told her that puppy-mill owners treated the dogs like a cash crop—that they had so many dogs it was impossible to care for them properly. I said it was different from dogfighting because the animals don’t get torn up like they do in fights. But it was inhumane because the breeding dogs live in lifelong confinement, often in overcrowded and filthy conditions, and they get lonely and depressed.
“Dogs need love and companionship—they were bred to love us and to spend time with us,” I told her.
She asked what else we worked on, and I told her about our larger campaign against animal fighting, which also included cockfighting; about combating factory farming and the killing of animals for fur; about protecting marine mammals and other vulnerable animals. She didn’t seem to know about any of it. It reminded me that I live immersed in a world where animal cruelty is a familiar topic, but that many people have scarcely heard of the problems of animal cruelty, much less our campaigns against them. That was the case with dogfighting before her fiancé put it in the news: few had any idea what was going on, and many who did know were unaware just how awful it really was.
Without prompting, Kijafa said Mike was always watching Animal Planet. She also mentioned he had pet birds at his house. “They would make a mess all over the house, but Mike didn’t want them confined in the cage and wanted to let them fly around.” This all seemed completely authentic; if this was a con, she was a natural.
After a few more minutes of conversation, Judy returned, and it was time to say our good-byes. I left Leavenworth behind, as Vick himself would in just a few days. Whether we would meet again, I still wasn’t sure.
Blood Sport Through the Ages
THE VICK CASE HAD been the biggest momentum builder in the history of the movement to eradicate animal fighting. Between the raid on Vick’s property and my first sit-down meeting with him two years later, we had worked with our allies to upgrade the federal animal-fighting law yet again, in the fall of 2008—strengthening its felony provisions and making it a federal crime to train or possess fighting dogs. People convicted of animal-fighting offenses would face a penalty of up to $250,000 and five years in prison. That upgrade of the law—the third one since 2002—would not have happened without the Vick case.
We had also worked to upgrade more than twenty-five state laws against animal fighting—making dogfighting a felony in every state. Arrests of animal fighters had more than doubled, and we had expanded community-based programs to attack the problem. The landscape had changed dramatically for the better, leaving animal fighters at greater risk than ever of being caught and punished.
Animal fighting is hardly a new vice. The same thrill that drew Michael Vick into the underworld of dogfighting had a hold on many others before him. In America, as long ago as 1866, the anticruelty crusader Henry Bergh exposed a dogfighting rin
g in New York City known as “Sportsman’s Hall.” The state legislature had banned animal fighting a decade earlier, but then as in our time the law was seldom enforced. Bergh’s new organization, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, embarked on a campaign of daring raids to change that. By 1880, the ASPCA had a hand in 510 arrests for dog-or cockfighting, and, by 1895, its agents could proudly report a noticeable decline in organized fights. Although animal fighting would continue in the dark corners of society, more and more it was treated as a serious offense to be rooted out.
Go back to most any time and place in history, and you will find staged fights between animals. Archaeologists have found evidence of animal fights tracing back at least three thousand years, apparently begun by tribes in the Indus Valley, where semiwild jungle fowl were pitted against each other. From there cockfighting seems to have migrated eastward into Persia, India, and China. The Greeks added their own twist to the blood sport by attaching sharpened blades to the spur behind the legs of contending birds. We’re told that before battles, the Greek general Themistocles even staged cockfights to get his men worked up and ready for violence.
The ancient Romans carried these cruel recreations to another level. The cages beneath the Colosseum were reserved for exotic creatures captured from every corner of the empire—elephants, bison, lions, bears, and even seals. These animals fought to the death—against each other and against gladiators—in front of cheering crowds. This was the fate of hundreds of thousands of animals in the years of empire. And along with most everything else Roman, organized animal fighting eventually caught on across Europe.
The Bond Page 16