It's come out recently that several prominent Dominican players like Pedro Martinez and Aramis Ramirez are heavily involved in cockfighting in their native country. Ramirez in particular, was ''prominently featured in a recent issue of a Dominican cockfighting magazine, En La Traba, in which he's pictured with several roosters that he raises for fighting. Of the roosters, he said in the magazine, 'When I'm in the Dominican Republic, I'm dedicated entirely to them.'''

Now, in America we eat more than 35 million pounds of chicken every year and also keep them in horrendous conditions and "mutilate them while they're alive", so we really can't get too worked up about a little cockfighting. But it makes you wonder about the harsh prison sentence given to Michael Vick who did the same thing Martinez and Ramirez did - only on American soil and with a different, albeit more lovable, species. Because even if it's legal to cockfight in the Dominican Republic, baseball could surely seek to ban those two players if it wanted to take a stand.

But it won't, and probably shouldn't, in my opinion, precisely because of the way we treat poultry in the U.S. - it would be hypocritical. So why the harsh punishment for Vick? I'd say there are two reasons (1) Because he was considered sort of a dirt bag generally with the "Ron Mexico" incident, his flipping off the fans and the behavior of his gun-toting younger brother; and (2) Because we love dogs (and most of us don't eat them) in America, and the idea that Vick would dogfight pushes emotional buttons in us.

But both of those reasons are flawed - (1) might be true, but has nothing to do with the offense in question and (2) isn't a sound basis for judging. If Vick had gone to trial on the charges, for example, it would be reasonable to disqualify jurors who owned dogs, just as jurors are disqualified all the time when there's reason to believe they'd be too emotionally involved to be objective.

I'm not defending Vick or the Dominican cockfighting baseball players - just pointing out that the application of justice here is woefully uneven.