Michael Vick and Dog Ownership

I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion with a lot of people, but I’m going to disagree with the common wisdom regarding Michael Vick and dog ownership.

Refresher: Vick was charged in 2007 with multiple federal counts of dogfighting. He pled guilty and served 21 months in USP Leavenworth, followed by two months of home confinement. Another condition of sentencing concerned dog ownership, banning Vick from owning a dog during his supervised release, which concludes in 2012.

A Bad Newz Kennels survivor

Vick recently commented that he and his family miss having a dog, and that he hopes they can have another one soon.
HSUS President Wayne Pacelle said in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he feels “confident that he [Vick] would do a good job as a pet owner.” Pacelle said in his blog though that his “position in one news story posted online yesterday was boiled down to the simple “yes-no” question about whether he should have a dog,” and that he felt “It’s too soon for Michael Vick to have a dog.”

Lisa Lange of PETA compared Vick to pedophiles, saying “Just as convicted pedophiles aren’t allowed free access to children, anyone who is responsible for hanging, electrocuting, or shooting dogs and who causes them to suffer in other unimaginable ways should never again be allowed access to dogs.”

Pacelle is closer to my feelings than Lange, especially when I consider PETA’s track record of killing dogs it’s rescued. Ironic, her statement is.

A lifetime ban is overkill. It penalizes Vick’s children for something they had no control over, and that’s not justice. We’re finally starting to understand that we shouldn’t penalize a felon’s spouse or housemates with regard to their Second Amendment rights for the felon’s acts. We don’t prevent the family of a drunk driver from owning a car or drinking alcohol. Why are we treating this case differently? How would it be administered after the kids are adults? Would they have to board their pets somewhere if Dad wants to visit?

If Vick’s family had owned a dog when he was sentenced, would PETA and others of a similar mindset have taken that dog away? Even when Vick was in prison and could not harm that dog in any way? What would that have accomplished?

We can and have rehabilitated the dogs that survived what he did. As I recall, only two of those dogs were ever put down, and only one was for aggressiveness. If we can rehabilitate the dogs to the point where many are adoptable (and recall that these were all pit bulls, which “everyone knows are vicious killers to begin with”), then why we can’t we rehabilitate Vick to the point that he can own dogs again?