Michael Vick is paying too big a price

The NFL season has begun, and I know who I am rooting for. Michael Vick. Once the highest-paid and perhaps most dynamic player in professional football, Vick has paid one of the highest prices in the history of animal cruelty. And he is still paying. Now working as a gadget guy and back-up quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, Vick has a target on his back and a price on his head - a Philadelphia animal rescue group will make a donation every time Vick is tackled.

Nice. I guess animal loving doesn't extend to human beings.

Michael Vick and some of his no-good buddies and hangers-on were caught two years ago operating a dog-fighting business and engaging in remarkable cruelty to those dogs who lost or wouldn't fight. It was not only illegal, it was indefensible.

But the punishment did not fit the crime. Vick spent 18 months in Leavenworth prison. He not only lost his $130 million contract with the Atlanta Falcons, he was forced to repay $6.5 million he'd already received. Of course, he lost all of his endorsement contracts. He was required to pay more than $1 million for the rehabilitation of the dogs that were rescued.

He was forced into bankruptcy with $16 million in debts and was stripped of his homes, cars and boats - permitted to keep only a pickup truck and a house in his hometown of Hampton, Va. But this isn't about the money.

Vick has a chance to make $7 million with the Eagles, which is a bigger payday than any other ex-con can hope for. This is about the humiliating tour of self-flagellation he has been forced to walk, and will continue to walk if the Humane Society bullies have anything to say about it.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell required Vick to appear before him so that he could take a measure of his contrition before he would be permitted to resume his career. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said he wanted to meet with Vick and see "a lot of self-hatred" before he would approve his signing.

The shaming continued on CBS's 60 Minutes, where Vick admitted that he wept in his prison bunk and spoke of his renewed faith in God as interviewer James Brown questioned his sincerity 10 different ways.

But the worst of it is, Vick is now on a leash held by the Humane Society's Wayne Pacelle. Vick has to make any number of appearances on behalf of the society, confessing to the error of his ways. "If Mike disappoints us, the public is going to see that," Pacelle told Brown on the same 60 Minutes broadcast.

Don't misunderstand me. I love dogs. Ask Amber, Lulu and Sugar. But I love human beings more, and what Vick is being required to endure is its own brand of cruelty. People with houses full of filthy, flea-bitten dogs and cats or farms with starving horses generally pay nothing close to the price Vick has paid, in freedom, money or reputation.

And this country is completely schizophrenic in its treatment of animals. Not only do we eat them, we treat them with inhumanity before we do. And we hunt them for sport. There was a lottery for the pleasure of killing bears, for heaven's sake. The winners celebrated their good fortune. The bears? Not so much.

For Michael Vick's dogs, the suffering ended in death or rescue. I don't think it is ever going to end for him.