NFL star’s indictment exposes bigger issues

By Ted Brewer, Best Friends Magazine Sept/Oct 2007

Ever since the federal indictment of Michael Vick was announced, the media has been busy unearthing a culture few people knew was so prevalent in the U.S.

We’ve learned that dog fighting is a pastime, a hobby and a way of life for some 40,000 people across the country, and in arenas ranging from professionally promoted matches on the estates of millionaires to impromptu brawls in the basements of inner-city tenements. Though the blood sport has been around for centuries, only in the last few decades has it migrated so far into the cities.

“Although 48 states call it a felony,” wrote Steve Malanga in the Chicago Sun-Times, “dog fighting is undergoing a resurgence, transformed from a once largely rural and illicit sport into a fashionable pastime with a certain outlaw cachet in many urban neighborhoods.”

Certainly, the proliferation of dog fighting in urban areas blind- sided many in the animal welfare movement, and left people asking why more attention hasn’t been paid to impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, where a dearth of recreational, educational and employment opportunities has allowed such a cheap and easy source of gambling and titillation to flourish.

A native of Newport News, Virginia, Vick grew up in one of those neighborhoods. The money, fame and status that come with being a pro sports superstar might not be enough to disabuse a person of what he may have learned on the streets – that it is okay, normal even, to engage in such a sadistically cruel sport.

Tony Gordon, elder of Liberation Christian Center and director of the Woodlawn K-9 Academy in Chicago, explains that dog fighting had been around Chicago for decades on a small, exclusive scale, but that it started booming about 20 years ago, which was when drug money started to enter the scene. “Having more currency flow,” Gordon says, “the drug overlords moved in.”

The drug culture has taken a devastating toll on communities where it operates, leading to what Gordon calls “kids born from kids,” the offspring of parents much too young and immature to provide their children with any kind of family structure. Without that structure, kids have been left to their own desperate devices, acquiring their values from those who flash the most wealth and display the greatest dominance on the streets – the drug dealers. And knowing what kind of sport their role models like to participate in, the kids have followed suit, as Gordon explains, “mimicking on a smaller scale what’s happening on a larger one.”

The result is that a once-exclusive, underground blood sport has gone mainstream, accounting for the thousands of fight-wounded dogs entering the city shelters.

It doesn’t help that the kids in the inner cities have few opportunities to engage in other, positive forms of recreation. “The playgrounds are torn down,” Gordon says, “the basketball rims are missing. In [inner-city Chicago] you have to create your own recreation.”

Gordon believes that the best way to fight the growth of dog fighting is for the law to punish the adults who drive it, and for us to educate and give our help to the kids and other adults who are susceptible to it. As the director of Woodlawn K-9 Academy and an accomplished police-dog trainer, Gordon has established a program to do the latter. He teaches children and adults how to train dogs, mostly those same tough-looking breeds who might otherwise end up pitted in a fight. Believing that dog fighting is based in low self- image and low self-esteem, Gordon offers his students a healthier, more humane way to boost their self-image and lift their self-esteem by staging alternative dog agility competitions, such as races and hurdle jumping.

In our effort to end dog fighting, perhaps it’s time for all animal welfare groups to wake up to the deplorable conditions kids and adults are facing in the inner city, and realize that if we’re ever going to put an end to dog fighting, we need to help create a situation where people would have no need for it.

As Gordon says, solving the dog fighting problem is “as much about helping people as it is about helping dogs.”

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