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Michael Vick... 15 Years Ago Today

FROM Nathan Winograd
April 25, 2022

The details that got to me then and stay with me today involve the swimming pool that was used to kill some of the dogs. Jumper cables were clipped onto the ears of underperforming dogs, then, just like with a car, the cables were connected to the terminals of car batteries before lifting and tossing the shamed dogs into the water.... That — and not the irrelevance of his skin color, others “who didn’t have [his] best interests at heart,” or any other reason — is why Vick was rightly prosecuted and widely condemned.

Pitbull Mel
After being rescued from Vick, Mel continued to suffer trauma — when he “meets a stranger, he goes into convulsions. He staggers back into a wall for protection. He lowers his face and tries to hide. New faces are not new friends, but old terrors.”

Fifteen years ago today, police raided the Virginia home of Michael Vick. What they uncovered was ghastly and would cast Vick as one of our generation's most notorious animal abusers.

Vick killed dogs by:

  • Hanging: “by placing a nylon cord over a 2 x 4 that was nailed to two trees located next to the big shed.”
  • Drowning: “by putting the dogs’ heads in a 5 gallon bucket of water.”
  • Beating: “by slamming [dogs] to the ground several times … breaking the dog’s back or neck.”
  • Shooting: “by shooting the animal with a .22 caliber handgun.”

And when some dogs did not initially die, he further brutalized them, even when his co-conspirators asked him just to give the dogs away: “One dog that did not die from hanging was taken down and drowned in a 5 gallon bucket of water.”

“He wore overalls, which were hung in the garage when he killed the dogs, so he would not soil his clothes.”

Police took almost 70 dogs still alive into protective custody.

Despite accepting a plea deal and serving less than two years in prison, Vick has never taken full responsibility and acknowledged what he did to those dogs. Instead, he laments what he lost after getting caught — the largest paycheck of any NFL player — and blames others, saying those “who didn’t have my best interests at heart” were the ones “to take all that away from me.”

He is not alone. Others also cast Vick as the victim. Wayne Pacelle, the former CEO of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and another predator of sorts (he resigned from HSUS after sexually assaulting women there), lobbied to resurrect Vick’s image. While Pacelle asked people to forgive Vick, he lobbied to have all of the surviving victims killed. And when the Philadelphia Eagles gave HSUS a $50,000 donation, Pacelle provided the political cover that overturned Vick’s “lifetime ban” from the NFL so that he could play again.

In her book, The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, Katja Guenther, a race and gender professor at the University of California at Riverside, similarly says Vick was the actual victim, prosecuted because of his skin color. And in a staggering racist screed, she also wrote that dogfighting is inherent to black culture, which views dogs “as resources, whether protective (as in guarding) or financial (as in breeding or possibly fighting).”

These views are wrong but echoed by Harlan Weaver, a professor of race and gender at Kansas State University. In the book Bad Dog, a work of staggering inhumanity, Weaver also casts Vick as the victim, says dogfighters should not be prosecuted, and further writes that the surviving dogs should not have been placed in loving homes. Echoing Guenther’s racist tirade, Weaver argues that those homes promoted “a white-supremacist ideal of family formations” because the dogs “were effectively segregated from Blackness by being placed into domestic spaces presumed to be ‘good’ and, therefore, tacitly white”: Sacrificing Animals on the Altar of Critical Race Theory

But as one of the rescuers wrote,

“Everyone we worked with was deeply affected by the case. The details that got to me then and stay with me today involve the swimming pool that was used to kill some of the dogs. Jumper cables were clipped onto the ears of underperforming dogs, then, just like with a car, the cables were connected to the terminals of car batteries before lifting and tossing the shamed dogs into the water. Most of Vick’s dogs were small — 40lbs or so — so tossing them in would’ve been fast and easy work for thick athlete arms. We don’t know how many suffered this premeditated murder, but the damage to the pool walls tells a story. It seems that while they were scrambling to escape, they scratched and clawed at the pool liner and bit at the dented aluminum sides…

“I wear some pretty thick skin during our work with dogs, but I can’t shake my mind's-eye image of a little black dog splashing frantically in bloody water… screaming in pain and terror… brown eyes saucer wide and tiny black white-toed feet clawing at anything, desperate to get a hold. This death did not come quickly. The rescuer in me keeps trying to think of a way to go back in time and somehow stop this torture and pull the little dog to safety. I think I’ll be looking for ways to pull that dog out for the rest of my life.”

That — and not the irrelevance of his skin color, others “who didn’t have [his] best interests at heart,” or any other reason — is why Vick was rightly prosecuted and widely condemned.

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