By the way: Look for the buzzword "je suis chien": 129 dead humans are a statistic and one dead dog is a tragedy.
Well, apart from "<small number> is a tragedy, <large number> is a statistic" paraphrase (bearing in mind that "<even larger numbers> are seemingly ignored by everyone" would be a continuation of that), there's other things to tug at the heart-strings.
The people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were targeted by hostile individuals.
The dog was sent
into danger
1 by the humans it would have considered to be its fellow pack-members.
If you don't know any of the people involved, you might, like me mourn them in an abstract and helpless way, balanced with hate for those who made them die. But you can't (well, I can't; YMMV) sublimate your emotions into hate against Diesel's handler, who was doing a
good thing in sending Diesel into the fray, to the net benefit of the operation. So if you feel
anything about the dog, there's nowhere else to go with your emotions.
Or so would be one interpretation. Add salt to taste. Or ask the waiter to return it to the chef as being overcooked, if you feel necessary.
(I'm not a dog owner. I wasn't even feeling emotional when I started this post, but now I'm starting to want to use the term "doggy heaven" and am finding myself quite cut-up. People don't go to heaven, IMO, but right now I sure want Diesel to get to Doggy Heaven and be rewarded with lots of interesting smells to smell and lots of chewy things to chew on...)
1 It might or might not have even understood there
was danger. From what I've read, its task was to find booby-traps, i.e. explosives. If that's the case then during training it would have smelt explosives, indicated to its pack-leader that it had smelt the explosives and then been rewarded with its favourite toy. Its medals indicate that it had obviously undertaken
real tasks before, but were they, to it (her, yes?) just a 'bigger game', with perhaps just more belligerent people between it and the stuff her pack-leader would reward her for finding? This time, however, the game ended in her death.