Is it fair to compare dogs to humans , like equal rights and equal punishments for example?

The question is whether M.V., who tortures dogs for money or amusement is so inhuman as to lack the capacity for empathy, and whether we can assess empathy capacity solely by the acts upon animals, instead of acts against humans. If we can, then we can reach the question of whether such people, proven to be humans in name only, are undeserving of rights to live among the rest of us, for certainly anyone lacking such empathy would be very dangerous to both animals and humans. Because of this, one needn't put animals and humans on the same level to execute Vick. If Vick has demonstrated limited capacity to feel, then the normal disgust that deters humans would not regulate his behaviors, so that he would be perceived as different enough from the rest of us that if we execute him, it wouldn't make us afraid we might be next. The problem, however, is that people fail to understand that the acts themselves are never enough to prove the existence of this deep intractable psychopathy. For instance, doctors, despite a surfeit of empathy, used to operate on babies without anesthesia except for some paralytic drugs to stop the squirming. They were rehabilitated and re-sensitized by media exposure to public shame and humiliation, being forced to listen to tapes of babies' screams from their own O.R.'s, so the medical profession's acts of torture far worse than Michael Vick could ever imagine, did not speak to their lack of capacity for empathy. While the medical profession was rehabilitated via civil lawsuits and re-sensitizing programming penetrating their denial mechanism that protected them from the guilt and horror of realizing what they did, it is the American penal system that achieves the same goals with Vick, and the rest of the criminals. Experts in penology have figured this out long ago, but they have learned to keep their ideas to themselves as the people of the land grow more and more distant.