Well, that was quick! Here’s what she said on The View this morning:

"Let me really just reiterate this for everybody: I was not condoning nor was I saying I thought Michael Vick did anything right—I did not say that I thought he was good in what he did. … I watched the show on another network that is a sports show, and what I saw made me take a minute to think about what happened with this kid, because they were talking about the culture of dogfighting, and so I thought to myself—well, if you're raised in it, that may be a reason why you're acting the way you have been acting. So I went on to pose this as a discussion, and somehow—I don't know how this happened, if you read the papers today—I'm eating dogs, I'm swinging them by their tail. … I love my animals. I have cats. I've adopted cats from various shelters, but I also believe that if there's a problem out there that we can address by checking out where it stems from, that we need to take a look at this in this high-profile area so we can mark it for the future. That was my point, and I'm very, very sorry—PETA and I are very close and we’ve talked about it a lot.

Thanks for clearing that up, Whoopi, and keep up the great work. Your fans appreciate it.

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Whoopi Goldberg certainly didn't shy away from controversy on her first appearance on The View—she came right out and offered the following defense of Michael Vick:

"He's from the South, from the Deep South ... This is part of his cultural upbringing"

I have no idea where she got that one from, but I can tell her right now that there are an awful lot of people in the South who'd be pretty upset by the implication that electrocuting animals is somehow "part of their heritage." Or, as PETA President Ingrid Newkirk put it in the letter she wrote to Whoopi yesterday,

"Those who fight dogs do so in New York, Chicago and even the Republic of Ireland, and what unites them is lawlessness and callousness, not whether they eat grits or Belgian waffles for breakfast."

Michael Vick needs a lot of things right now—some serious counseling for a start—but he doesn't need anyone to give him lame excuses for his decision to torture dogs for pleasure and profit. He needs to face that horrible fact all by himself.

Ingrid spoke with Whoopi on the phone last night after she received the letter, since Goldberg actually has a good track record with animals outside of this incident, and Whoopi explained that she had never intended to appear accepting of cruelty. Let’s hope she makes up for it with some positive comments about animals on The View after this rocky start.