Where is America’s outrage when women are target?

CHICAGO – I like my dog, a basset hound, a lot. He’s probably 10 pounds overweight, sleeps most of the time, barks at the mail carrier, waters fire hydrants and, given the chance, buries things for safekeeping. He’s a big lump of a cliché.

So when I read and heard about some of the dogfighting atrocities Michael Vick is associated with, it turned my stomach.

But the convulsive reaction to the Vick case has made it obvious we’ve lost our sense of proportion.

Dogs are defenseless, and we humans are quick to protect the defenseless. It is one of our better qualities. But a woman in the hands of a 230-pound elite athlete is more or less defenseless, too, and I can’t remember any case of domestic abuse, sexual assault or murder involving an NFL player that sparked this kind of public outrage.

The O.J. Simpson saga? Perhaps. But what’s interesting is the different public response to the two crimes. At the time of the Simpson trial, most people were more concerned with his innocence or guilt than they were with the butchered bodies of the two people who were stabbed to death.

This case is different. It’s hard to get rid of the image of dogs being drowned or electrocuted or beaten to death. Whether Vick was personally involved in those activities or not doesn’t really matter. He is going to plead guilty to charges involving a dogfighting operation apparently run out of one of his properties. Whether his hands were actually around a dog’s neck is beside the point. His fingerprints are all over this case.

But if an NFL player beats the hell out of his wife or girlfriend these days, it’s greeted with a practiced shrug. It happens so often, we’re almost numb to it.

Media coverage has played a huge role in the Vick case. Take one of the NFL’s most prominent players and show visceral file footage of pit bulls chewing each other to pieces. What do you have? Something that stabs people right in their hearts.

The networks didn’t run file tape of a gun being fired into a woman after Carolina wide receiver Rae Carruth conspired to murder his pregnant girlfriend. Nonetheless, a jury found him guilty in 2001, and he’s serving a 19- to 23-year prison term. If there was public indignation to rival the Vick dog charges, I missed it.

In February, Tennessee cornerback Pacman Jones was involved in an incident at a Las Vegas strip club that led to the shooting of three people, including a guard who is now paralyzed from the waist down. Do our feelings of outrage and sympathy extend to the people who absorbed those bullets? I don’t think so. Certainly not the way they do to the slain dogs. We’re too busy being aghast at Jones’ behavior and, more broadly, at the behavior of the legion of unruly NFL players.

As sure as a football field is 100 yards long, Jones will play again. The league has suspended him for a year because of the Vegas incident and a string of additional problems with the law. Yet we hear rumblings that Vick’s career might be over. His crime is so heinous, we’re told, that he might have forfeited his right to play in the NFL again.

In the mid-1990s, Nebraska star Lawrence Phillips pleaded no contest to trespassing and assault after allegedly beating his girlfriend, who said he dragged her by her hair down three flights of stairs. It was the beginning of a long stretch of criminal trouble involving Phillips. This did not stop the Rams from making him a first-round draft pick, nor did it stop the Dolphins and the 49ers from giving him chance after chance to carry the football again.

Abuse your dog, and people howl. Smack around your girlfriend or sexually assault a woman and people shake their heads and roll their eyes. And they’ll eventually cheer you again. If you don’t believe that, pay attention the next time Kobe Bryant comes to town.

The public reaction to Bryant’s troubles – he reached a settlement with a woman he was charged with sexually assaulting – wasn’t nearly as loud and angry as the reaction to Vick.

This case has legs, four of them, and we’re finding out it makes a huge difference in the court of public opinion.

No doubt Vick needs to spend some time behind bars, and no doubt he shouldn’t play football for a while. He’s the face of what’s wrong with the NFL. What he did was vile.

Let’s be clear: It’s not that the response to Vick’s alleged crimes is overboard; it’s that the response to athletes’ crimes against women is underwhelming. We might want to ask ourselves why.

A little perspective, please – especially the next time a player attacks a woman. Another incident should be happening any day now.