Annette John-Hall: Vick will be judged by off-field actions

OK, so now that we know he will play tonight, sports-talk junkies will no doubt spend their day analyzing, arguing, and re-analyzing whether he should play quarterback or slotback. Or how much speed he may have lost. Or what his impact in the locker room might be.

But all of this should be the least of what Michael Vick cares about.

Because in the game of life, the football field is not where he will ultimately make his mark.

Not anymore. Not when "convicted dogfighter" is used more to describe Vick's status these days than "all-pro quarterback."

Whatever real good Vick accomplishes will be in neighborhoods like the one in East Germantown where authorities broke up an alleged dogfighting ring over the weekend.

The Humane Society of the United States says it wants Vick to demonstrate a real commitment to change by working with the group to raise awareness about the horrors to dogfighting to kids in the inner city.

Well, there's no better time than now. And there's no better place to start than on East Bringhurst Street, where children are, quite literally, walking down the wrong road.

East Bringhurst is a long, winding block, which is why neighbor Sheila Stanfield was oblivious to the dogfighting arrests. Her house is further up the street.

But it might as well be around the world, as far as she's concerned.

She says she never walks down to the 200 block and doesn't allow her kids to go there, either.

"It's pretty vicious down there," Stanfield says. "A lot of drug dealing, from what I understand."

So it didn't surprise Stanfield to learn that investigators found two dead pit bulls and three pit bull mixes chained in the backyard of a house where James Hargrove, 43, lived. One of the dogs had open wounds on his face that are consistent with fighting.

Hargrove, 43, and Tyrik Carr, 18, were charged with cruelty to animals and criminal conspiracy, both felonies.

If the 200 block of East Bringhurst is a dogfighting "mecca," as authorities say, then Philadelphia is the capital, with 400 cases already investigated so far this year, up from 237 in all of 2008.

And that doesn't include incidents of straight-up animal cruelty, such as the case this week of the Harleysville woman who decided to serve her pit bull - as well as her 29 cats - d-Con instead of dog and cat food.

Linda Muchnick may have been suicidal. But the mind-sets of the many young men who fight animals may be just as skewed.

After all, it's unreasonable to expect kids to show compassion toward animals when violence is always circling, ready to bite at any time.

That's what Vick was trying to articulate when he wrote about his reasons for inflicting pain on his dogs - reasons he may not fully understand himself.

"My whole life has been numb," he blogged. "I was numb to the violence in my community . . . 'cause I saw it all the time, ever since I was a child. I mean, how does one grow up in a city that's nickname is 'Bad Newz'?"

The same way kids grow up in a city with the nickname "Killadelphia."

At its core, treating animals cruelly stems from a lack of self-worth.

Meaning, if you can't love yourself, how can you love anything else?

"The absence of empathy is one of the roots of all evil," agrees Randall Lockwood, a psychologist who is senior vice president of the ASPCA's anticruelty field services. "The vicarious thrill that people have in witnessing violence comes from identifying with the aggressor and not with the victim."

The violence-as-sport explanation holds true not only in cases of animal abuse, but also for senseless, random beatings of innocent humans on SEPTA subway platforms.

That's why the first stop on Vick's redemption tour should be John Wister Elementary School, which sits smack in the middle of the block on East Bringhurst Street. I'm hoping that Vick will share his story with the students of the horrific mistakes he made, the lessons he learned, and the price he paid. To get through to young people living in a toxic environment who are in danger of becoming desensitized like he was.

Yes, I will root for Michael Vick. But the football field is the last place I expect to cheer him on.