Which is worse, torturing a dog or a human being?
Don’t answer too fast. I will argue it is more complex than it appears.
A man can harm or kill another person in a brief burst of temper.
But torturing a dog must be a long contemplated act. An angry person may punch a hole in a wall or hurl a plate of spaghetti.
But he is not going to turn into the reasonably despicable Michael Vick and hang — hang! — a dog for the sport of it. Not because Mr. Vick and his gutter-level friends had been drinking something or smoking something.
No, the series of tortures that this disgusting person perpetrated were stealthily, methodically pre-meditated.
Such unspeakable evil springs from a tortured mind. This is not a man who overdrank one night and ran over a person.
The crimes against society that Mr. Vick dreamed up and carried out required, I believe, a laboratory hatched by an even darker mind than is necessary to murder a human.
Let me twist this a little:
For more than 30 years, Dennis Prager has asked audiences that if a stranger and your dog were drowning and you only could rescue one, which would you choose?
The stranger, you answer. Of course. Wrong. One-third of Mr. Prager’s respondents said their pet.
What kind of person would save his pet instead of a fellow human? Plenty, dear readers. They live around you, and may even glut your neighborhood.
I have a sister who is enormously sensitive, but since she lives virtually alone, except for Reva and Reecie, I am confident she would choose one of them. As with many who live alone, those dogs are her daily world.
(To be concluded tomorrow)
