"Vick Dog Fighting Violated Human Dignity"

With the Michael Vick guilty plea, I updated my earlier column on how his dog fighting activities violated our human duty to treat animals humanely for the San Francisco Chronicle. It is a little stronger on the human exceptionalism than the former column, and all in all I think, a somewhat better piece.

But this fascinates me: Every time I bring up human exceptionalism, some people get into high dudgeon—insisting that we are not special. I am not sure why these folk seem so attached to human unexcetionalism. But if being human isn’t what gives us the moral obligation to treat animals (and the environment) properly, I don’t know what does.