Defending the Undefendable: Michael Vick, Dog Killer

(this article is rebroadcast from LewRockwell.com)

Defending the Undefendable: Michael Vick, Dog Killer

by Todd Steinberg

I have been studying libertarian theory for the better part of two years now, and last year I read Walter Block's Defending the Undefendable with much alacrity. Afterwards, I wondered if there were any "lost chapters" that he could have written, especially now that over 30 years have passed since it was first published. Inspired by recent events, I have taken an opportunity to write about someone who clearly needs to be defended.

Two years ago, when professional football player Michael Vick was arrested for financing and organizing dog fights in his backyard, he didn't have a single friend. When a person leaves a dog in his car without rolling down the windows, we look upon the owner as an irresponsible felon, so you can imagine the outrage when people learned that Michael Vick had trained dogs and put them in harm's way for the sake of sport.

Now that Michael Vick is out of prison, perhaps we can have a conversation as to why he was arrested in the first place. I take the position that animals are private property and that as long as Michael Vick peaceably acquired the dogs, it's nobody's right to tell him what he can and cannot do with his possessions.

Though some may find dogfighting to be barbaric and uncivilized, that is no reason why the practice should be outlawed. Currently, there are thousands of businesses whose purpose is to raise animals, slaughter them, cut them into manageable pieces, package them, and ship them worldwide. There are advertising and marketing operations that aim to increase our consumption of animals. Television networks regularly feature people who demonstrate their ability to cook animals in novel ways so that we do not grow bored of their taste. These people learn their techniques from schools built for this purpose and some of the graduates write books about the art of cooking and eating of animals.

So if one believes that fighting animals is barbaric, then certainly eating them is just as barbaric if not worse. Some people believe it's inhumane to use animals for any purpose, whether it be for food, clothing, shelter, milking, sport, burden, service, companionship, exhibition, or experimentation. If we were to take the position that animals have equal rights, then no human has more rights than any other animal. We couldn't make any distinction between an elephant and a nematode for if we did, we'd quickly revert to a system where humans are more equal than cows, and cows are more equal than chickens. For a system of animal rights to work, humans could only do what they wanted to do so long as they weren't infringing on the rights on any other animal.

If an absolute system of animal rights were adopted, then we'd have no choice but for all of us to go vegan. However, even if we all unanimously decided to refrain from consuming meat and dairy, it wouldn't be enough to save us from having to violate the rights of animals on a regular basis. If we were to dig up a parcel of land to plant crops, we are disrupting the ecosystem of whatever animals reside there. Even if we were to forgo cultivation and revert to the gathering of nuts and berries, we are again encroaching on the private property of animals such as bears and squirrels who acquired homesteading rights to the nut trees and berry bushes long before humans arrived there.

Though we may personally feel it's immoral to eat animals or milk them, keep them as pets or beasts of burden, it's equally immoral to throw someone in a cage and take their property for not adequately following someone else's arbitrary rules on the proper treatment of animals. Declaring animals as private property is the only moral and consistent way to deal with the topic of animal cruelty. It is your right to do what you will with the animals you own just as it's your neighbor's right to tell you how much better your life would be if you'd minimize your animal consumption.

Greater than the cruelty of animals is the cruelty of hypocrisy. The day Michael Vick was charged with the crime of endangering animals, how many of the arresting FBI agents had bacon with their breakfast?
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June 3, 2009

Todd Steinberg [send him mail] works with his family at a wholesale teddy bear company in Dallas. In his spare time he is furiously working on his cartoon, "Don’t Tell My Wife I’m a Cult Leader," which he plans to unleash on the Internet and beyond in 2009.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Gary Taubes on . . . feeding dogs?

I've posted about "low-carb" for dogs before, but never from a weight-lifters site.

Josef Brandenburg at Tmuscle.com has a great interview with physicist Gary Taubes.

All right. I know what you're thinking. A bodybuilder interviewing a physicist? What kind of alter-dimension is this? Just proves low carbing affects the brain, right?

It can all be explained.

Testosterone Muscle: You started out writing on stuff like rocket science. How did you first get interested in obesity and public health?

Gary Taubes: Well, after I finished my first book, Bad Science, on the cold fusion nonsense in Utah, some of my physicist friends said to me, "If you like writing about bad science, you should check out public health. You'll have a field day."

So I started writing about public health, and it turns out the science was pretty universally terrible. I did a story for Science magazine, in which I spent a year on the controversy over whether dietary salt causes high blood pressure. One of the worst scientists I ever interviewed — and I had interviewed some really terrible scientists in my life — took credit for getting Americans not only to eat less salt, but also to eat less fat and less eggs.

I literally put the phone down when I was done with the interview, called up my editor, and said one of the five worst scientists I've ever interviewed took credit for getting Americans to eat less fat and less eggs. I don't know what the story is with fat and eggs, but if this guy was involved in any substantive way, then there's a good story.

Sometimes it is just that easy to sniff out the rats in the woodshed. Scientific training can help refine the ol' sniffer, but scientific training alone does make a person smart. All those bad scientists Mr. Taubes interviewed are ample proof of that. There remains an element science has yet to discover that separates intelligence from idiocy.

Ms. X calls it "Truthlightium".

These days Mr. Taubes is best known for authoring the watershed article "What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie?" in the New York Times.

In that article he questioned the "knowledge" we all had that low-fat was good and fat, especially animal fat, was bad.

When I was a young girl, I had a whole set of craft dolls bought with coupons from the back of Blue Bonnet Margarine boxes. Crisco was normal shortening. That's how deeply my family believed the evil-fat hypothesis. I was a teenager before I tasted real butter.

Our family dog ate vegetarian dog food. (THAT, is a whole 'nother post.)

After the NYT article came a book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories". GCBC made the link between carbohydrates and heart disease and a whole host of other health problems.

TM: Let's get to the most controversial point: You say that eating extra calories won't make people fat.

GT: The assumption that fat tissue isn't regulated at all is almost naive beyond belief.

[GT] If you look at animals, all animals regulate their fat tissue very carefully. You can't just force animals to overeat and make them fat.

TM: Really?

GT: They won't do it. The only animals that will get fat by dietary means are very carefully bred rats in laboratories, and house pets that don't eat the foods they evolved to eat.

If you've ever looked at cat food, it's packed with carbohydrates. And yet cats are carnivores in the wild. Felines don't eat carbohydrates. They eat meat. That's what they do. And yet we take then into our homes, we feed them carbohydrates, and lo and behold, they get fat.

Ditto dogs.

Combine the carbs with inbreeding and viola! Disaster.

Several years ago someone wrote that cats were first domesticated because they were so good at protecting the grain stores from the rodents that consumed them. The cats were good because they ate the rodents. They didn't eat the grain.

How far we've come.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Can you afford your doggie door?

Evidently litigious lawyers are falling on hard times, like everyone else. Maybe gas it too expensive to actually chase ambulances these days, so they are reduced to scouring coroner reports and obituaries.

And what are they finding?

People are stupid, and accidents happen. Either, or, both.


Children's Deaths Tied to Pet Doors
Unknown Danger for Curious Tots Able to Squeeze Through Tiny Openings

The headline says enough, huh? "Unknown Danger". NEWS FLASH! Children can go through openings a normal size adult can't fit through!

But it's not merely going through the doggy door that kills the child. It's the swimming pool in the backyard, maybe the cars on the road, or the five gallon bucket sitting on the patio.

More than a hundred children have died or been seriously injured in the last decade after squeezing through tiny pet doors and getting into swimming pools or other dangerous places, new research has found.

Let me make sure I understand. There is an DOOR OPEN to the backyard. You have a swimming pool filled with water, and inadequately secured (fence, alarm system, cover etc....).

The child EXITS said door, and DROWNS (tragically) in the pool.

Who's fault is that?

Oh, sorry, the door was small. My bad.

"Parents don't appreciate that their children, even if they're bigger, can get through," said Dylan's father, Hank Didier, a Florida lawyer suing a pet door manufacturer for the family of two-year old Matthew Ranfone.

Matthew's mother Carol, of Spring Hill, Florida, found her son floating in the backyard swimming pool after he managed to get through a small pet door in the family home.

"I remember when the accident occurred," she recalled, "and thinking to myself, 'How in the world did he ever fit out of that door?'"

The PetSafe door in the Ranfone home contained no warning to parents of the possible danger on its package or product instructions.

She was outraged to learn that many children had died under similar circumstances before her son.

"It was just unbelievable to me that all of these accidents happened as a result of doggie doors and how come I wasn't informed," she told ABC News.

Sometimes kids don't even try to go through the pet door. Sometimes they just open the door and walk right out.

It's a hellacious thing. It is very distressing to have to write about this.

But we must keep perspective. The external doors to my house did not come with warnings about small children learning how to unlock them and exit before I suspect they might figure it out.

The road in front of my house does not have a sign warning that small children unrestrained in the front yard might run quickly to the middle of the road.

At the request of trial lawyers, Sean Kane, of Safety Research and Strategies, combed through hundreds of coroner's reports and media accounts.

"It's a very laborious task to get through the documents and the data and the connections to find these incidents," said Kane. "But I think at the end of this we're going to find hundreds of incidents."

Kane compared the issue with pet doors to the discovery of the pattern of children hurting themselves in cribs.

It is NOT THE SAME AS CRIB INJURIES at all. The article did not mention any incidents of children being guillotined by the pet door, or getting stuck in it and starving to death, or some other form of death by pet door.

In fact, Ms. Ranfone's website tells this story -

It was a typical late afternoon and the house was buzzing with three adults and two children when Matthew found the doggie door behind the couch. He crawled through it and made his way onto an enclosed patio area and then through a pool fence.

"Through a pool fence". Yet it is 'through the doggie door' that is blamed for the accident.

Maybe this is why:

"I just want parents to understand the danger associated with the doggy doors. I never ever considered that a child would ever go near the door," Ranfone said. "It was inconceivable to me."

"Through the fence" must be self-evident.

Now I am not opposed to slapping a warning sticker on a doggy door saying "Not for use by children" or something like that, IF a manufacturer feels so inclined. But it is not necessary. Logically, where are you going to draw the lines? At what size of doggy door is the danger self-evident? And if the Great Dane's doggy door requires a sticker, then should not the human door?

Or perhaps the doggy doors should be redesigned, but at what price to the consumer? And why should pet owners pay this price, and not the pool-fence purchasers?

This story was came to my attention via OverLawyered.com, where the commentators had already sussed out the *shocking* fact that Ms. Rafone's "advocacy" website was in fact registered to her lawyer, and the design was eerily similar to his site.

The "advocacy" website was launched just earlier this week, according to the local Fox News report, just in time for the Good Morning America show.

The accident, btw, happened in 2006.


More on Radio Systems Corporation's CEO

More on Hank Didier and here

More from the Safety Research Group

1 year old killed by family dog

Not very many details about this case, police say it will take "days" to piece all the details together.

Police probe death of child by family's pit bull

The boy was attacked by the dog shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday. The father, whose name was being withheld, shot the dog to death with a handgun.

Support Your Local Puppymill

The 70's were a disaster for pets. Overpopulation was a serious problem. The top barbie breeders ran high volume commercial kennels, and neutering was almost unheard of.

But the 70's were (to Ms. X's constant surprise) 3 decades ago and counting. And the pet overpopulation problem of the 70's is relatively non-existent today. Neutering is very common, and the top barbie breeders despise commercial kennels.

Things have improved GREATLY. This despite an increase in human population, that one would naturally think would correspondingly increase the unwanted pet population. And it was all done without a lot of horribly restrictive legislation and regulation.

Why then, are we today attempting to cure the cure by destroying freedom?

We can compare it to current mainstream economic thinking. Economically, we are facing a problem of past catastrophic proportions. In the 'Great Depression', we attempted solutions that failed utterly. Today, we are attempting the same solutions, only much more strongly.

In one case, we did nothing (no governmental control), and things got better. In the other case, we enacted a lot of governmental control, and things got worse. At first glance you might think there is no correlation between the two problems, and solutions then and now.

But there is. It is this.

The correlation is control. One group wants to control a larger group, so they do it by government-proxy. When a person can't morally, or legally, force their neighbor to bend to their will, they do the next best thing and troll up an emotional frenzy in a few people to get their government to do the dirty work of forcing their neighbor to bend to their will.

Control by government proxy.

Peta-tics wanting to end pet ownership are the animal equivalent of the Trilateral Commission promoting world monetary policy.

Keynesian policies are the popular response to the current economic crisis because of control. They ENCOURAGE, even MANDATE governmental control. And that, ultimately, is what people want.

Peta-tic policies are popular because they too ENCOURAGE and MANDATE government control.

The facts that one will bring economic ruin and commmie style breadlines, and the other the practical end of pet ownership, are so inconceivable to most Americans that they are dismissed out of hand.

I am not certain most Americans would care if they did believe it.

If you think stacks of cages and piles of excrement are distasteful under basic animal cruelty laws, you are badly prepared for the cruelty you will see under black market, profit only breeding systems.

If you thought banning cockfighting and dog fighting would simply end the cruelty and life would continue as normal for everyone who did not force roosters or dogs to fight each other, you might want to pay attention to the ongoing attempts to have the post office censor your mail.

The attempt is an end run around the first amendment, which so far has protected free speech even if it involves things that make you ill. Videos, for example, of bullfights are legal to own and view (for the present) as long the content was not filmed in this country.

But could they get the post office to censor bullfighting magazines and refuse to transport them through the government (tax-payer funded) mail system?

"Hey! I pay taxes, and I don't want my tax money to transport bullfighting magazines." the suddenly fiscally concerned citizen protests.

Most people have no problem destroying the first amendment (or any freedom) if it allows them to control (by proxy) what they don't like.

They will say it is worth it, after all, if more roosters are killed and genetic diversity lost and freedom of speech trampled but *cruelty* is stopped. And should a video of roosters fighting without human provocation land some one in jail?

Collateral damage. Not just the purview of neocon warmongers.

But now, NOW the horrifying cruelty of a dog with matted fur and a wire cage (designed to keep him out of his feces) has spawned an equivocal grasping for control and we stand witness to unprecedented attacks on the gentle pastime of dog breeding.

Bo's breeder has joined the self-destructive brigade, expressing alarm that the painfully small genepool of the Portuguese Water Dog might be expanded at the hands of puppymillers. Perhaps she reasoned, an offensive barb might shield her from the fate of VP Biden's GSD Breeder.

Dog wardens from the state showed up at Brown's Wolf Den kennel, repeatedly, for inspections.

"I was cited for a piece of kibble on the floor and five strands of dog hair. They took a picture of that, they walked around, snapped pictures and don't tell you why," Brown told the newspaper.

She was found "not guilty" for each citation, but hiring a lawyer for the court hearings has cost her $4,000 so far in legal fees.

Brown says she and Biden both received death threats from animal activists.

The Obama Aura might protect Bo's breeder, but daily the rest of us are regaled with attempts at stringent and invasive control over the free dog market.

Ohio "Cracks Down" on puppymills
Washington State "Cracks Down" on puppymills

Ohio wants to mandate "appropriate protection against parasites". Will it allow for holistic approaches?

Ohio also wants to set up a "kennel control authority board" which would include a representative from the AKC. That's right. The "non-profit" dog registry wants CONTROL AUTHORITY over how every dog is bred and raised.

Perhaps they want to make sure every dog will qualify to star in films like this?

It's okay though, says the executive director of the Ohio Veterinary Medical Assocation. "Such legislation is warranted".

"The vast majority of breeders are responsible and they do a wonderful job taking care of their animals, but there are some bad apples," he says.

Just a few bad apples. Would those be real puppymills? Or just breeders that don't like AKC?

Does it really matter? "Puppymillers" (by any definition) are more hated than Micheal Vick.

The reactionary assault will have devastating consequences. Care to wager if it will be years or months before a wonderful little book like "Raising Puppies for Profit and Pleasure" is no longer protected under the First Amendment?

This is in part, a crisis of confidence. Breeders have no confidence in their pet buying public. Who is for real, and who is a peta-tic spy? They are withdrawing into themselves and closing ranks. They are, justifiably, abandoning the practice of welcoming customers to their kennels - the one practice that in wide usage could do more to stamp out substandard breeding facilities than anything. Even large commercial operations under full government oversight are scared of peta-tics and reluctant to welcome outsiders.

So while shelter numbers are at all time lows, and adoption rates are at all time highs (and the 70s are only a bad memory), the fever pitch of the anti-puppymill crusades are guaranteeing we will never truly minimize the real travesties.

Instead, the fear that closes kennels to the public on one side, and the legislation that drives more breeders underground on the other, will fixate the real puppymills as permanent features of society. Regulation and mob-rule by government proxy always serves to de-civilize our world.

So go on. Do something about it. Stand up for the right of your local puppymill to exist.

Be Mencken.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. - H.L. Mencken

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Words that have no meaning.

Troll. In the early days of the internet, "troll" meant someone who lurked on a discussion board and intentionally wrote inflammatory rhetoric, for the purpose of stirring the pot and causing conflict and consternation.

And example would be a discussion board devoted to knitting cashmere, and a troll might come along and post (usually just once) that angora was far superior to cashmere, and cashmere devotees where insane.

Now consider a discussion board devoted to the merits of knitting, where in one poster starts a thread titled "I love cashmere, do you?" Someone posting on this thread that angora was superior to cashmere would not necessarily be trolling, even if they used the term "insane".

This is the Age of Obama, and Troll now means anyone who has an idea I don't like. Even if I have invited counter opinions.

The Fox News headline read "Obama's Effort at Online Transparency Stymied by Internet Trolls".

But the article said this:

Obama held an online "town hall" forum on the economy and invited the public to post questions on the White House Web site.

Three and a half million people participated in the event, but the "trolls" had their way: Following a coordinated campaign by marijuana advocates to vote their topic to the top of the list, questions on the future of the U.S. dollar and the rising unemployment rate were superseded by questions about legalizing pot as an economic remedy.

How often does the general public get access to the President to pose questions? Not very often, and probably less since Joe the Plumber did. So how exactly is a question about the economic benefits of legalizing pot a trolling question?

It's not.

Unless you are using the new meaning of "troll", which is someone making a point of argument that someone else does not like.

What does this have to do with dogs?

How about the word "puppymill"?

In it's original meaning, puppymill meant a facility so foul that the owners could not escape animal cruelty charges. A puppymill almost always operated exclusively outside of any regulatory jurisdiction, such as the USDA or state inspections. The animals from a puppymill were by definition in horrendous physical condition, evidencing signs of grave neglect.

Is that what you think of when you think of puppymill? Or do you use it to describe any facility without carpeting where a dog spends part of its time in a crate? Perhaps for you it just might mean a facility (irregardless of condition) that has several breeding dogs, 10 or 20 or 50 or more.

What number you think constitutes a puppymill is most likely a function of your own health, physical fitness, age and imagination. When mom is cold, she assumes everyone is cold. If dad can't see to read his book, he assumes the room is too dark for anyone to see to read. If you don't think there is any way on earth you could manage the care of more than 20 dogs, 20 dogs is probably the number you think a puppymill starts at.

Nowadays, as some have said before, a 'backyard breeder' is anyone who doesn't run a facility the way you think they should, but has less dogs than you. And a puppymiller, in modern terms, is anyone who doesn't run a facility the way you think they should, but has more dogs than you.

These words have no meaning, yet everyday people urge their legislatures to seriously limit freedom based on these words alone.

The Washington State Legislature did it just the other day, as reported in the AP:

OLYMPIA, Wash. - The Washington state Legislature has approved a measure cracking down on dog breeders who operate puppy mills.

Under the bill, dog breeders and owners would be barred from owning more than 50 dogs over six months old that are not neutered or spayed.

The word "puppymill" has become empty but inflammatory rhetoric. The original work of Trolls.

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FIDOTUS...in the poke?

The half-grown Portuguese Water Dog that inhabits that White House is now old news, and the controversies that surrounded the selection are beginning to die down.

So I'll bring up a new one. While everybody was busy whining about the bad example the Obamas' were setting for the entire country by not "adopting" a "rescue" dog, Ms. X was fretting over the bad example the Obamas' were setting for the country by not performing due diligence in their purchase of the puppy.

The problem of animal shelters is not one of over-population, as the Border Wars dude pointed out recently, it is a problem of home-retention. One of the best ways to tackle the problem of Home-retention is due diligence in the pet purchase process.

The Obamas did not set a good example.


The Obamas accepted a dog from a breeder they had never met.
The only way to end the travesty of substandard breeding is for the pet buyers to personally review the facility their new pet comes from, and approve of it with their money.

Equally important, the pet buyer should be comfortable with the breeder they are dealing with. They are buying a living creature, that they will have to support and sustain for 10 to 15 years. This is best accomplished with a pleasant and trusting relationship with the animals breeder. And such a relationship is best established in person.

The Obamas accepted the dog from a breeder who did not even own both parents.

A pet buyer is well advised to meet both parents of the puppy they want to purchase, and any other extended family members possible. Meeting both parents is one of the critical elements of pet purchase, as far as I am concerned, and a primary mark against purchasing from pet shops. You, the puppy buyer, are buying a personality that must fit with your family. You are not buying a breed description. You are not buying a show ring title. Some breeders do puppy temperament tests, and try to match the puppies in a litter with what they know about the humans who want to buy. That is all well and good, as an additional activity to the pet buyer meeting and liking the personality of both canine parents.

Don't blindly trust the breeder, especially if the breeder does not live with both parents themselves.

The Obamas accepted the puppy as a gift. A puppy is a long term commitment. A gift has all the negatives above (didn't meet the parents, didn't meet the breeder) as well lacking the level of dedication that only comes from the hard work of achieving a goal. As most of us learn when we are children, half the value of anything is the hard work that goes into achieving it. A puppy is no different. Putting the time, and the effort into visiting breeders, meeting dogs, not to mention the actual financial outlay, increases the value of the prize, and increases the level of commitment.

The Obamas bought a dog from a barbie breeder. Neither Mister or Missus Obama had pets growing up and the current Obama children have never had a pet either. So for a pet they pick a traditional hunting breed from a top show kennel. The Obamas don't hunt. Nor are they likely to be spending their weekends on the showring circuit. They should have sought a breeder who specialized in pet dogs. (Yes, sometimes Ms. X asks the impossible, but if you don't have expectations, they'll never be met.)

I want dogs to stay with their owners for life. Getting that relationship right means starting right at the beginning. If we don't have a good example, a well publicized bad example will do just fine.

I give Bo 2 months.