Football and Dogfighting
Posted on October 26, 2009 at 8:27 pm by kyliu
Tags: america, culture, dogs, ethics, football, newyorker
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Another entry in my long-standing crusade against a contemporary cultural tendency to elevate dogs over people.
Some may think that our growing concern with the ethical treatment of dogs shows our moral evolution as a society. I think it’s more complicated than that. When we think it’s more important to treat a dog nicely than to treat people nicely, it shows our moral corruption and degeneracy. That charities for pets get more money than charities to save children in Africa is not a sign of enlightenment. We have failed.
(This is not an argument that one shouldn’t care about pets or that an individual giving money to charities for pets is “wrong.” Rather, the point is that if we collectively divert more resources and sympathy to animals than people, then that is not a collective social decision that indicates any moral enlightenment or advancement. Quite the opposite, actually.)
Malcolm Gladwell, “Offensive Play”, The New Yorker, October 19, 2009:
Goodell’s job entails dealing with players who have used drugs, driven drunk and killed people, fired handguns in night clubs, and consorted with thugs and accused murderers. But he clearly felt what many Americans felt as well—that dogfighting was a moral offense of a different order.
…
[A dogfighter] willingly submitted his dog to a contest that culminated in her suffering and destruction. And why? For the entertainment of an audience and the chance of a payday. In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport.
Except when the sport is football.
It is inconceivable to me how people can think that murdering people is a lesser offense than dogfighting.
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