The Mike Vick case... am I a life nit?

[DrewDevil]

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1) people willing to treat animals in this manner are almost certainly willing to treat people in a similar fashion.

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Is this just something you made up, or do you have evidence to support this claim?

Also, I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here, but I don't believe in jailing people because they are "willing" to commit violence against other people. If a dog abuser moves up to people abuser, I'm all for locking him up. But not because he might do it.

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You are talking about the blatant disregard for the right, feelings, etc of another living being.

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As I said, I don't believe in "animal rights," and I explained why. Can you explain why you do? Lots of things are "living beings," but only humans have rights. If you want all "living beings" to have rights, then why aren't you outraged at the squashing of insects, cutting down of trees, etc.

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Nobody gets upset with vets for painlessly putting a dog down. We are talking about electrocuting till dead, a living animal for no purpose other than it didn't fight well enough and someone with $100 million didn't want to pay $1 a day for food. this isn't "killing" a dog. This is torturing a dog until it's dead. There's a difference here. There would be outrage if he shot the dogs in the head...but the outrage would be much less simply because it's a quick, painless death.

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I agree that torturing a dog is much worse than euthanizing it, and I've never said otherwise. Are you just making a strawman here?

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2) If you decide which crimes are "important" and which crimes aren't, you are going down a slippery slope. there are unsolved murders in every major city. Do you propose that we pull every cop off of every street and have them work on the single unsolved murder because it's the worst crime possible? You can't simply ignore other crimes because you think there are other ones that are more important. I seriously doubt there are other federal crimes out there that they decided to not prosecute because they were devoting too much time to Michael Vick. You can't honestly believe the police in America can prevent all "pain" in humans as you put it by ignoring dogfighting?

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How is there a slippery slope? I just gave you a bright line. Prosecute crimes against people, not against animals.

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3) With all due respect, you don't sound like a libertarian/government minalist. You sound like an anarchist. We the people of the United States as a democracy by an overwhelming majority i'm sure, do not condone dogfighting. Further we have seen fit to make it a criminal activity, generally a felony in every single state. Furthermore, it's also a federal crime. Since the will of the people is to criminalize these acts, the government did. If the overwhelming majority of America thought this was ok, there would be outrage in defense of Michael Vick. That isn't the case obviously.

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The "it should be the law because it IS the law" argument is weak, as I've previously explained. I understand that Vick actually broke the law and I'm not arguing that he didn't. I'm arguing that the law should be different.

And, "most people agree with me so I'm right" is also weak. I could name any number of examples from American history where the majority opinion was hopelessly wrong. America is a republic, not a democracy, and the goal is to protect individual rights (of "persons," if you read the Constitution) against the majority/mob rules.

So the fact that most people think Vick deserves jail time is not a good argument that Vick deserves jail time, IMO.

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I believe libertarians are more along the lines of "i'm doing something that doesn't hurt you or anyone else." Well dogfighting hurts dogs. Dogs are provided protection under our laws, therefore you can't participate in activities harmful to them. Libertarians aren't for dogfighting, they are for letting people gamble, go to strip clubs, watch porn, drink, etc. They aren't for animal torture. Surely you can see that.

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I can't speak for what other libertarians believe, but again, dogs are not people, and so therefore, "dogfighting hurts dogs" does not violate your made-up libertarian creed that "i'm doing something that doesn't hurt you or anyone else."

Libertarians think the government is way too big and that there are way too many laws, so again, "we have this law" is not convincing. There needs to be an independent reason for the law.

And so far, your reasoning seems to be that dogs are "living beings" (i.e., just like humans) and they deserve protection (just like humans). But I don't agree that they're just like humans, so your reasoning is not convincing to me.