On Thursday, a number of Sun Journal readers posted comments on the newspaper’s Facebook page and on our website suggesting that 24-year-old Nicholas P. Libby be fed “to the dogs.”

One commenter even suggested he serve as human bait for grizzly bear fighting.

That can’t really be what we want. Right?

Libby was charged Wednesday with theft, alleged to have taken an American bulldog from its home in West Paris.

He was in a Paris courtroom Thursday afternoon. From there, the constitutional process will move forward and — if convicted — Libby will answer for the crime.

In the meantime, assumptions have been made that Libby is somehow connected to a rash of pet thefts in Oxford County, and there was a suggestion that feeding him to sharks would somehow be too kind.

Dogfighting is illegal. It’s cruel and it’s wrong.

We Americans love our dogs, and most of us treasure them as members of our families, so the instant hatred for anyone who steals or hurts a dog is understandable.

But to suggest that society’s response to quell this crime should be to feed anyone who steals an animal, or who organizes or attends a dogfight, to killer dogs so they can be ripped from limb to limb is clearly an emotional response and no real solution.

As we’re seeing across the country, including recently in Waterville, efforts are being made by police to step up investigation of dogfighting and enforcement of related laws. If society doesn’t believe current laws are strong enough, then lawmakers can step up and toughen state statutes.

According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, active dogfighting has been part of the American landscape since the 1750s, and really took hold in the Northeast in the 1860s.

Although it’s not possible to say how many animals are injured or killed during illegal fights each year because there are no national statistics available, the ASPCA has tracked a growing popularity of fighting, as social media has made it easier to organize these underground events.

Social media has also made it easier to organize the theft of so-called “bait” dogs to train canine “fighters,” a longtime practice of dogfight organizers, which is what one animal control officer in Oxford County believes may be going on there now.

In a National Geographic report published in 2004, an Arizona detective estimated that half of the 3,396 animals that were missing there during a six-month span were “likely stolen” for use by dogfighters. Given that the popularity of dogfighting is greater on the East Coast than out West, the numbers may very well be higher here, where police have long recognized a correlation between dogfight rings and missing pets.

People can — and do — debate whether the “pit bull” breed should be regulated as the favorite athlete in the dogfighting world, but stomping out dogfighting is not about regulating dogs. It’s about training their human owners and handlers, the so-called “dogmen.”

The popularity of dogfighting is a discouraging human trend and we should do everything we can to enforce the law through criminal prosecution.

Then, perhaps, for consistency’s sake, we ought to focus some attention on the so-called “sport” of cockfighting, which is every bit as underground and inhumane as dogfighting.

Cockfighting is illegal in the United States but still legal in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, where, on any given Saturday night, fights are broadcast on network television.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and editorial board.