Last summer when fans were gearing up for the NFL season, Michael Vick was found guilty of dog-fighting charges. Fans were outraged by Michael Vick’s involvement in dog fighting; Vick did horrible things to dogs and people were angry and disgusted by it. Even, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched multiple campaigns urging NFL to sack Vick. Eventually, Vick was sacked from the Atlanta Falcons and indicted of dog-fighting charges.
There is no questioning the fact that dog fighting is gruesome and immoral lifestyle and those involved should face severe punishment. But if you followed the story closely, there was another question that popped up: Was it ethical to make money off the Michael Vick dog-fighting situation? As soon as Vick was indicted of the charges, many parties saw an opportunity to make money by selling anti-Vick related accessories, which includes t-shirts, car stickers, hats. Etc. A simple Google search would show there were many different parties involved in make the best of this opportunity but one that was the most interesting and questionable was PETA.org.
PETA, with more than 1.8 million members and supporters, is the largest animal rights organization in the world. PETA works through public education, cruelty investigations, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns. If you visited the PETA website, you would notice that it had created a store with anti-Vick shirts, hats, buttons, dog clothes and other products. This was very unusual for an organization like PETA, who holds high standards similar to UNICEF. No matter what the scenario, one has never seen UNICEF offer products for sale to make a quick buck. I'm sure that a case that involved a public figure would lead to the temptation to maximize the monetary opportunity but clearly there were moral issues involved; organizations such as PETA are expected to not let monetary opportunities supersede moral and ethical behavior.
I think ethical companies that had ties to Vick made the correct moves in distancing themselves from Vick. Nike for example, removed any Vick products from its site. But it seemed like PETA was too busy chasing dollars. So if you had a chance, would you act similarly to PETA?
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It is MORE ethical for people to make money with Anti- .. messages on t-shirts than it is ethical for them to treat those dogs the way they treated them. We enjoy some of your articles but on this one we need to disagree in this way.
Lots of times when people abuse animals and people, people do make money off of the publication of the information or the production of articles that publicize it. The only thing that we can say is if Vick did not abuse the animals then no one could make anti-vick material , correct?
We think that we need to begin blaming, IF we need to blame, blaming the persons who commit the crimes, not blaming the persons who make money off of the anti-crime publicity.
We believe that criminals in jail already should not make money on crimes or on publicizing crimes but people outside of jail and corporations who commmitted no crime should be able to publicize on tshirts and other products and they should make money off of the products. We are thinking that they put that money towards more research and more exposure of crimes, and perhaps that is why some people are against that.
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