How different are dog fighting and football?

[Manifestor_of_Light]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_...

Is football equally morally repugnant, because of the severe brain injuries to football players?
The New Yorker
Annals of Medicine
Offensive Play
How different are dogfighting and football?
by Malcolm Gladwell October 19, 2009



After the tape session, Guskiewicz and one of his colleagues, Jason Mihalik, went outside to watch the U.N.C. football team practice, a short walk down the hill from their office. Only when you see football at close range is it possible to understand the dimensions of the brain-injury problem. The players were huge—much larger than you imagine them being. They moved at astonishing speeds for people of that size, and, long before you saw them, you heard them: the sound of one two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man colliding with another echoed around the practice facility. Mihalik and Guskiewicz walked over to a small building, just off to the side of the field. On the floor was a laptop inside a black storage crate. Next to the computer was an antenna that received the signals from the sensors inside the players’ helmets. Mihalik crouched down and began paging through the data. In one column, the HITS software listed the top hits of the practice up to that point, and every few moments the screen would refresh, reflecting the plays that had just been run on the field. Forty-five minutes into practice, the top eight head blows on the field measured 82 gs, 79 gs, 75 gs, 79 gs, 67 gs, 60 gs, 57 gs, and 53 gs. One player, a running back, had received both the 79 gs and the 60 gs, as well as another hit, measuring 27.9 gs. This wasn’t a full-contact practice. It was “shells.” The players wore only helmets and shoulder pads, and still there were mini car crashes happening all over the field.

The most damaged, scarred, and belligerent of Michael Vick’s dogs—the hardest cases—were sent to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, on a thirty-seven-hundred-acre spread in the canyons of southern Utah. They were housed in a specially modified octagon, a one-story, climate-controlled cottage, ringed by individual dog runs. The dogs were given a final walk at 11 P.M. and woken up at 7 A.M., to introduce them to a routine. They were hand-fed. In the early months, the staff took turns sleeping in the octagon—sometimes in the middle, sometimes in a cot in one of the runs—so that someone would be with the dogs twenty-four hours a day. Twenty-two of Vick’s pit bulls came to Best Friends in January of 2008, and all but five of them are still there.

“We certainly know from boxers that the incidence of C.T.E. is related to the length of your career,” he went on. “So if you want to apply that to football—and I’m not saying it does apply—then you’d have to let people play six years and then stop. If it comes to that, maybe we’ll have to think about that. On the other hand, nobody’s willing to do this in boxing. Why would a boxer at the height of his career, six or seven years in, stop fighting, just when he’s making million-dollar paydays?” He shrugged. “It’s a violent game. I suppose if you want to you could play touch football or flag football. For me, as a Jewish kid from Long Island, I’d be just as happy if we did that. But I don’t know if the fans would be happy with that. So what else do you do?”

Casson is right. There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.

[H2O Man]

1. Legalize Lonnie Anderson's hair.

[rd_kent]

2. No, because football players CHOOSE to play football........

[Craftsman]

3. Football is the perfect metaphor for war

It is a violent game of land acquisition. I LOVE IT!!!! GO PATS!!!!

[NeedleCast]

4. Vastly - Football Players Have Free Will and Choice

[napi21]

5. BIG DIFF! Humans (the football players) have the ability to make

their own decision about what they want to do and how much risk they want to take with their future health just to make a lot of money. Dogs on the other hand do not! They are thrown into a very risky and damaging situation, without their ability to consent, just for the sake of SOME HUMANS to make money!

[1]

6. boo football. we should all cover ourselves in bubblewrap and sit quietly in chairs...

that way very few of us will ever get hurt.

[damntexdem]

7. Dog quarterbacks cause delays of game: sniffing the center's butt.

And dogs are no good on the long pass plays -- dog wide receivers can't catch them; but dog safeties can't intercept them, either.

[LanternWaste]

8. Unions, trade agreements, contracts, free-will...

Unions, trade agreements, contracts, free-will, choice... I imagine the list goes on and one if one simply applies a little bit one's mind to it.


"The most damaged, scarred, and belligerent of Michael Vick’s dogs—the hardest cases..."
I can only assume they're referring to the ones that were still alive rather put to death, yes (as it seems a very telling-- and somewhat disingenuous omission of a relevant fact)?

[Enrique]

9. if we forced random people to play football

if the NFL could come and grab me and force me to play football, and destroy me if I don't do so good, which I probably wouldn't.

Or if Vick's dogs had agents that negotiated million-dollar contracts.

Then the analogy might be useful.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

10. Correction

"The most damaged, scarred, and belligerent of Michael Vick’s dogs"
should be
"The most damaged, scarred, and belligerent of Michael Vick’s SURVIVING dogs"

[Richard D]

11. Dogs don't have the choice.