My youngest daughter, a member of PETA and an avid animal activist learned a very hard lesson a few years ago. Believe me, her heart was in the right place, but she wasn't "thinking."
She has two cats, one of whom is a "ragdoll," if you've ever heard of them. They are very timid and fragile (long white fur, but really small cats, very beautiful blue eyes). She has had this cat since she was a kitten and loves her like her own child. I would say "Minou" is about 14 years old, but this happened several years ago.
One morning, my daughter picked up a stray dog who looked as though he had broken from where he was tied because he had a collar and a long leash dragging behind him. He seemed very friendly and benign, wagging his tail, etc. She was afraid he would get hit by a car, so she took him into her apartment and put him behind a closed, locked door in the closed porch section of her apartment with some food and water. She said she had planned to call the police from her office and go back and get the dog during lunch break.
Through some sort of miracle, she entered her apartment at just the right time. The dog had chewed through the door and was in her bedroom on top of Minou and just about to pick her up and fling her, as dogs do to cats to break their necks. My daughter immediately screamed and pounced on the dog, who had already bitten Minou on her back. She was able to wrestle him from Minou, who disappeared immediately.
She put the dog outside and called the police to let them know what had happened and that the dog was now loose in the streets. She was more concerned about Minou and how badly she was hurt. When she found her, she realized right away that the cat was totally traumatized, but not badly hurt. She took her to a vet who stitched up a fairly superficial bite on her back. However, it took months before Minou became her normal self again, and my daughter was filled with guilt and sorrow for a very long time. She couldn't believe she had not anticipated that a dog could chew through a door to get at what he obviously knew were cats in the apartment.
I know my daughter and had her Minou been killed by this dog, she never would have gotten over it or forgiven herself.
I guess my point is one never knows what an animal is capable of, and my daughter knows animals very well. They deserve love and respect for who they are, they deserve humane treatment at all times. But they also deserve to be recognized as animals who will act upon instinct. It's almost never their "fault" when things like this happen, it is almost always human error or ignorance that causes tragedies such as this could have been, and which did happen in the other post about this topic.
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