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.
'Pretty vicious'
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.
