COMMENTARY: VICK AND KEEPING IT REAL (AND GREEN)

by Alan Grant

Animal Planet is pretty cool. I loved it when Flower, the grand dame of the Meerkat Manor ruled her roost with the iron paw. Seriously, who can resist a mongoose that stands upright and peers into the camera? I appreciate the motherly way of Officer Debbie McDonald of the Detroit Animal Cops and I admit to tearing up when Steve Irwin was taken from us. Like I said, I dig Animal Planet. But we don't live there.

So I was pleased when Michael Vick, an inhabitant of this planet-the planet ruled mostly by money, and on occasion, influenced by logic-was allowed to keep his loot. The 16 million was part of Vick's roster bonus. This particular bonus is earned by simply making a team's regular season roster. Kudos to Vick's agent, Leigh Steinberg, who made this possible not for a fringe player fighting to make the team, but the team's starting quarterback. Nonetheless this is the most sensible development in what is certainly the biggest moral charade of 2007.

On an intellectual level, I don't profess to understanding the pleasure derived from electrocuting a dog, or watching its eyes bulge from its head while it hangs from a tree. But Michael Vick shouldn't be in prison. His punishment should have been more practical. He should have been fined. No, not 20 million dollars, not even the 3.75 million that will be successfully expunged from his account. A few thousand dollars would have sufficed. He didn't kill my dogs, or your dogs. He wasn't some stealthy figure, leaping suburban fences, swiping dogs for the purpose of executing them like some strangely ambitious cross-species serial killer. Vick killed his own dogs.

General population is for those who have committed crimes against beings who possess an identical biology. For the record I would maintain this stance even if Vick's coffee brown complexion didn't resemble my own. Had Scooter Libby, Lou Dobbs, or even Joe Horn (no, not that Joe Horn, the Joe Horn from Texas who gleefully murdered two men in his front yard) been the proprietor of Bad Newz Kennels, I would still recommend a punishment commensurate with the crime.

Are we really supposed to believe Blank was a victim? Really? We're talking Home Depot here. Next quarter's sales from lumber alone will allow Blank to recoup his 16 mil. Thus the words "poor Arthur Blank" seem comically incongruent. Somehow Bad Newz Kennels made its way into the Michael Vick section of the Falcons' media guide. Okay, so I doubt the Lord of Falcons manor had time for final edit of that particular opus, but we're supposed to believe that no one else read those words and pondered their meaning? Perhaps someone went to said Kennel in search of a disheartened Collie or a spirited but lonely Labrador only to find& well, we know what they found.

They found a crime scene. And perhaps somewhere it is a crime worthy of death to a man's career.

Just not on this planet.

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