Good dog

Just down the road from where I live there lives an old lady in her 80s. Every day three times a day, come rain or shine she is to be seen trudging up and down the road taking her dogs for a walk.

It's more a slow shuffle than a walk but her resolution to fulfil her obligation to the dogs is unshakeable. She loves her dogs more than herself. She has become defined by her dogs and their needs. She spends a fortune on Vets bills, the slightest ailment and they are there at the doggy doctor. I would hasten a guess that she rarely visits the doctor on her own condition but the dogs get the full treatment.
It's funny how some people can focus so much of their love on an animal. The dog particularly has a disposition which we interpret as human. We look into their eyes, as they look into ours and we interpret the thoughts we have for them as their thoughts for us. We promote our intelligence onto them and we make them human.
It's the search for comprehension and love. We yearn for understanding, and in transposing our emotions into the dog we have a buddy who knows us and feels for us, as we feel for them.
Anything that is alive can have an effect because we cherish what being alive means. The sight of pigs, crushed together in a truck on their way to slaughter, their eyes seem full of misery and they reach right into our soul. 
But do we commit an error, aligning ourselves with their predicament. 
I'm sure the psychologists have a term for this transfer but is it just one of the mechanisms we have of searching for resolutions to problems which are artificial and lie outside our ability to comprehend things which exist beyond the brains ability to apply reasoned cognitive thought. 
The dog is not human, the pig is not human. Both are living animals and therefore we should respect them and treat them humanly but to equate them as anything other than animals, in terms of emotion is plain stupid.