All Dogs go to Heaven.

Or so the movie would have us believe.

I like dogs. A lot. They've brought a lot of joy to my life.

Lately, I've been edified a lot by my fiance's brother's Pit Bull, Diesel. He's really sweet, goofy, and kinda shy. Totally not what you'd expect out of a Pit Bull, given the normal attention they get from the media. Shawn, Maribel's brother, rescued him from a very unpleasant home and has shown him a whole bunch of love since then.

There are a whole bunch of Pit Bulls in Virginia who will die without knowing that kind of experience, what it's like to be loved by a human. All they've seen of us, as a race, is how craven we can be. They've seen our most nauseating cruelty. People have profited and taken sick pleasure in their horrible suffering.

All of the people responsible for that suffering deserve to be locked away for a long time, not to punish them (although they deserve that punishment), but to protect the rest of us from them. The link between cruelty to animals and cruelty to other people to the point of sociopathy has long been academically established.

But the fame of one of them has brought this into the public eye. In a way that it would never have been had the head of it all been only rich, and not rich and famous.

But what to do with Michael Vick? What to think of him? How should the NFL treat him?

Personally, he nauseates me. I find dog fighting repugnant. But, then, I also find violence toward women repugnant. And yet, Michael Pittman remains a Buccaneer, despite having attempted to run his wife and child off the road with an H2.

All life has a bit of the divine spark in it, from oak trees to the bacteria in your colon to horseshoe crabs to the mites that feast on your dead skin in your bed. It's all of a piece. The way we treat all of it reflects on us.

But I really gotta think that other humans should get higher consideration than any other creatures as it regards how we treat them. The victims of genocide in Darfur, even thought I've never met a single one, get more of my sympathy than Mike Vick's dogs do.

The difference is, we have the ability to apply a bit of justice to Vick and his accomplices, and to socially shun this scum by not allowing him to entertain us any more, to take away his superstar lifestyle. That should happen.

But if the NFL does that while allowing serial abusers of women to play on its fields, than its priorities are seriously screwed up.

I love Diesel, but I wouldn't die to defend him. Maribel, on the other hand, or my mom, or my sisters, or my future sister- or mother-in-law, all of them I'd die to try to save from violence.

But the NFL seems to think violence toward women is excusable...

Oh, and PETA can go fuck itself in the ear. Just 'cause.