Since I know someone’s going to ask me about this today, I thought I’d just get it out of the way.  So, how about that one hundred million dollar deal for Mike Vick?

Let me first give my football opinion (because that’s why you read an animal welfare blog, right?).  Vick’s just not that good a quarterback.  Consider that his first year closing games in Philadelphia his QB rating was only .9 better than Donovan McNabb who was then traded.  Consider that prior to coming to Philly, Vick’s best QB rating year (81.6 in 2002/3) was only better than McNabb’s second worst year ever, excluding their rookie years.  That’s right, in ten years as a starter with the Eagles, Donovan had eight years with better ratings than Vick’s career high. 

As a quarterback Vick is over rated, past the age at which they should be referring to him as the franchise future, and is definitely overpaid.  And I still can’t watch the Eagles because I just don’t like the slightly elated feeling I get when our own guy gets sacked.  After all, I’m in supposed to be humane.

As far as the whole ex-con, dog torturing thing goes, I still stick by my belief that the NFL should have a self-imposed ban on hiring violent felons in order to maintain some level of moral authority.  But they made their decision to be a corporate entity placing money above morality long before Vick’s re-hiring, so what’s one more bad decision?

Vick has been living up to his agreement with the Humane Society of the United States (no relation to the Humane Society of Berks County), such as it is.  He has given his talks and mostly been saying the right, if occasionally moronic things.  As a human being, I don’t begrudge his being offered a chance to atone and even forgiveness from those inclined to give it.  Heck, I’ve made my share of mistakes and received many second chances.  Of course, I never drowned dogs for fun and money.  Besides, I don’t think anyone really expected some Siddhartha like transformation from him.  The dude’s just a football player, after all, not Buddha.

The most important thing I think Vick and HSUS have done was promote a Federal bill criminalizing involving minors in dog fighting.  If he is nothing else, Vick is the poster child for the results of bringing kids to dog fights.  I hope the photo opp on the Capitol steps gave pause to every humane organization near his childhood neighborhood in Virginia who weren’t there to save Vick as a boy from being turned into the “man” he is today- or at least was a few years ago.  After all, we don’t just have a responsibility to the animals, we have a responsibility to children who their lives ruined and their souls ripped up into little Voldemort sized morsels by being exposed to blood sports.

But the final thing that springs to mind are the meetings I and others had with Joe Banner, Eagles President, after the signing of Vick on 2009.  He said they had made a decision that Vick was reformed, they recognized that the signing brought a lot of baggage, and that they were committed to make a very real and substantial investment in animal welfare.  They did that through their TAWK grant program.

The grant program has funded numerous animal welfare programs in the region and was accepted by many organizations, even the most boastfully strident among us.  The $50,000 grant received by the HSBC funded the VetMobile, a mobile veterinary unit which has been used to provide low and no cost care to the pets of the poor, serve as a mobile Ani-Meals On Wheels distribution site, functions as a mobile adoption location, been used to help stem the annual and devastating parvo outbreaks in Reading, and has been deployed to assist in major cruelty cases.  None of these things could have been done without that Eagles TAWK grant.

I say again, Joe Banner kept his word.  I still think signing Vick was both a bad football decision given his less than stellar talent and a bad corporate decision for the NFL.  But vastly more concrete good has come out of the TAWK grant program than would have if the Eagles had hired, oh, I don’t know, a rapist or something.  For some reason that’s one duck no one wants to seem to call a duck.  Or call Pittsburgh Pennsylvania’s second largest city.

Of course, I do think that if the Eagles created a $500,000 grant program for a signing deal in the couple millions for Vick in 2009, now that they have made a deal of one hundred million maybe it’s time to shake that tree again a see how much more good I can get the Eagles to do for animals.

So I’m going to ask for another TAWK grant and I hope they come through with a big one.  We have a really great project coming up that will help a lot of animals and people and we could use their help.

Hmmmm….You don’t think the Eagles actually read this blog do you?  Uh, oh.  I hope they give me a second chance, despite my big mouth.

This past Friday a couple senior members of HSBC staff and I attended meeting of animal welfare executives hosted regularly by Penn Vet School and Michael Moyer, head of their shelter medicine program.  It was a great meeting, as always, and I’ll be talking more about it in the future.  But it also led to an interesting meeting as we walked back to our parking garage at the end of the day.

Walking out as I walked in was Joe Banner, President of the Philadelphia Eagles.  We had met twice at the meetings held by the Eagles following the signing of Mike Vick.  I re-introduced myself and thanked him for the $50,000 grant HSBC received via the Eagles TAWK Grant Program and told him it had helped lots of animals and people in need.  He said something like, “I think we kept our word on that.”

I have dedicated maybe more than my fair share of time and words to condemning the NFL, and the Eagles by extension, for hiring and aggrandizing violent offenders since they signed Vick.  Being someone with three young daughters, I don’t limit my disgust over the hiring and hero worship to Vick.  Roethlisberger deserves as much or more and the two are Pennsylvania’s East/West coast poster children for the triumph of money over values in the NFL.  The NFL doesn’t seem to understand that that fans invite them into our living rooms and as a rule, I don’t welcome animal abusers and sex offenders into mine.  A $50,000 grant didn’t change my mind on whether signing Vick was the  right thing to do, even if it was the Eagles’ right to do it.  The grant program was their pound of flesh given to pay for the problem they had bought.

However, when we were first at those meetings and people were saying they were strictly for show and the Eagles would follow through on nothing once the cameras turned off, it was Joe Banner’s word which kept me coming to the meetings.  He was honest when he said their evaluation of Vick’s rehabilitation and his hiring was different from ours (and how!) but that they realized they had “bought a problem” and that they were going to do something significant about that problem.

I wrote then that the verdict of that commitment would hang on how true Banner was to his word.  “I think we kept our word on that,” he told me Friday.  Joe, I think you did, too.

Joe, the grant program you set up was one of the largest animal welfare contributions ever made by a corporation not involved in veterinary or pet services.  The grants were given with no strings attached and no requirement for advertising or nice-making on the recipients’ end.  You have given grants to lots of places, even those who were less judicious in their scorn of the Eagles’ decision than even I have been.  Your money has been doing good that would not have been done had you not granted it out and, as some claim, the media attention to the Vick signing may have led to an increased awareness and reporting of dog fighting (although the other correlation offered is that Vick’s notoriety simply increased the amount of dog fighting to be reported).

It may not have been as much as some wanted.  It may not have been in the form some wanted.  But you said it would be substantial and meaningful and it was.  We in the animal welfare world demanded our pound of flesh and you carved it out without whining.  You, Joe Banner, kept your word and, in a world of weasels, I thank you for not being one.

I still won’t be having your friends in the NFL over to my place for beer and chips on Sundays as often as I used to, though.  I just don’t like the way they keep looking at my dog and my daughters.