Goldberg pointed out that Vick was raised in the South.
"This is part of his cultural upbringing," said Goldberg.
Eh. Well, U2dem or joyfulgirl could perhaps comment on this more meaningfully than I could, but it kind of sounds like nonsense to me. According to the ASPCA link anitram provided earlier, dogfighting isn't "more common" in any one particular region or metro type (inner city-vs.-rural) than others, and furthermore, it first became widespread (in the US) in the late-19th and early-20th century urban Northeast--often using dogs imported from Ireland or England--and spread from there to other regions of the country. True, by midcentury it was more widespread in the rural South, since animal cruelty laws there weren't as stringent (yet), but in more recent decades it's simultaneously become less widespread and also more geographically and demographically diffuse. When I was growing up in rural Mississippi (and I'm almost a decade older than Vick), I did hear a few times about dogfights locals had attended in other towns and cities in our vicinity, but I'd hardly describe it as a local "cultural tradition" in the same way as, say, hunting or blues festivals or a church fish fry, and it definitely had a stigma attached to it--not so much on account of the "blood sport" aspect as because there was this idea that seedy people frequent that kind of thing, that there'd be lots of drinking and brawling there and you might get mugged or something. (For the record, most of the locals were poor black people and that's who I got these impressions from, so it's not one of those things where "seedy" is really just racist code for "black cultural traditions" and therefore it must be sleazy.) I actually remember one of our neighbors talking about how he'd seen a "real dogfight" once, I think in Biloxi, and that "it was kind of exciting, but I think it's a damn shame to waste a dog's life like that".
I will say, though, that most people in the area did
not keep dogs as beloved "family pets"--if they owned one, it was either some tough, hardscrabble-looking mix-breed who lived outside and whose only role was to guard the property, or maybe a couple coonhounds who, again, lived outdoors and had the dual job of guarding the property and going hunting with their owners. You seldom saw people walking their dogs, playing fetch with them or hugging them, and most dog owners there would've died laughing at the sight of some frilly Maltese being carried out of a "dog grooming parlor." So it might be fair to say that there was somewhat of a "cultural" attitude that dogs are for working, period, which might've indirectly lent some support to the idea that dogfighting is a "sport"--albeit one with highly dubious social connections.
So, Whoopi (who was born and raised in NYC, and has never lived in the South) *might* have a point to the extent that
maybe Vick's "roots" didn't equip him with quite the same automatic revulsion at the idea of dogfighting for "sport" most Americans would have...but, even setting aside the illegality of it all and the grisly "executions" he participated in, I find the implication of "that's just a Southern thing"--as if this were some much-loved Southern pastime that we all get misty-eyed over, or as if Southerners saw the criminalization of dogfighting (mostly in the '80s, in the South) as PC Yankee suppression of a little harmless down-home fun--overdrawn and patronizing. In any case, that's the law and it was enacted for a reason, so it shouldn't factor into his sentencing one way or the other.