The New Yorker published an article recently that compares dog fighting to football. At first I was furious, but then I read it and I was less so. (Here it is, if you want to read it, but it’s long for an internet article.)
I get their point that football is brutal and players end up suffering long term injuries thanks to a societal push to put the game over their own well being. Of course, we all face that kind of challenge, though perhaps not as severe as in the football job field. The article ignored some things for the effect of the argument, and I get that, but I think that these ignored factors are just too important to discount, even in trying to make the point that football itself is a brutal, damaging sport.
1. And yes, the most important: Consent. These dogs cannot consent to their training, their treatment or their fights. They never have the chance to say no because they have been manipulated. Their instincts have been twisted and cultivated to suit the needs of the humans. In fact, even fighters will tell you maybe one dog in a litter is a good fighter, because the rest simply don’t have the viciousness needed. That’s right, most pit bulls are too sweet to fight.
But, even if they were somehow not manipulated and trained into fight and if they were given the choice a dog, like a child, is not capable, mentally, of understanding the risks of fighting. Adult humans are capable of understanding that playing football will, very likely end up getting them hurt. You don’t start playing football at the NFL level. Many, many players have already had years of football experience which includes injuries.
Players can say “It’s not going to happen to me” all they want, but by playing they are consenting to take the risk that serious injuries in a way that a dog cannot understand and therefore cannot agree to.
2. The difference between the medical care NFL players receive and the dog receive is significant. There are college departments, careers and hospitals devoted to the health of athletes (I know, my cousin graduated from one of them after playing football for Ball State for four years and, last I heard, now studies and deals with athletic injuries professionally.) I’ll give you that long term effects are likely ignore and poorly documented, but when a player blows out a knew, breaks a leg, or gets a flipping scratch they are taken care of and supported.
When a fighting dog gets a gash it’s common for the owner to staple the wound closed with an ordinary office stapler, give it an injection of pain killer, once or twice, then the dog goes back to the kennel, or back on the chain and that’s it. Dog fighters cannot take their dogs to the vet because it’s clear they’re involved in illegal dog fighting. And even if they could most wouldn’t because the industry is about maximizing the profit which means only spending as much on a dog as you have to.
The answer to a broken leg or a serious injury is a bullet. We do not have anywhere near this attitude with football players who are idolized and given excellent medical care in the hopes they can be “fixed” and play again. And what happens if they can’t? They retire.
Fighting dogs don’t retire. Not to mention significantly more fighting dogs die each year from their “careers” than high school, college and pro football players combined.
3. The median salary in the NFL in 2009 is roughly $770,000. Meanwhile fighting dogs are kept often in vacant houses and hidden backyards, on heavy chains (keeping a dog on an increasingly large chain is a passive way to strengthen the dog’s muscles) by people who see them as disposable. NFL players are idolized, paid well (and yes, one would expect anyone who puts their body on the line like that to be paid well, but then the median pay for a cop is about $47,000 a year) and often considered celebrities. We put their faces on our T-shirt, we let them host Saturday Night Live, they get endorsement deals and have homes that can officially be deemed “cribs”.
Fighting dogs are beaten, sometimes even drugged, purposefully isolated from social interactions. The only affection many of these dogs get is when they are ripping into the flesh of another dog. The only approval these incredible social, pack-based creatures gets is by hurting something else. In fact the #1 way to keep a dog from striking out in a danger, aggressive way is to teach it how to interact with people, other animals and things in a variety of social situations, aka “socialize” it. So to keep a dog aggressive it must be sentenced to a life of solitary confinement except to fight and breed.
I agree that awareness needs to be raised about the long term impact of football, and the practices that endanger current players, but comparing NFL football to dog fighting is ignore some pretty obscene differences. Furthermore articles like this could be skewed and used (in people’s minds, not literally because the article never defended dog fighting) to defend dog fighting as a sport “no more cruel or dangerous than football”. The article also ignores the whole culture of dog fighting which commonly includes drug dealing and use, dealing in illegal firearms and sometimes even gang violence. I admire the New Yorker’s desire to raise awareness for those suffering from damage due to football or boxing, but let’s not even begin to pretend dog fighting is anything less than a brutal form of abuse on every level, and an extremely dangerous thing to allow within the community.
