But stories with animals, especially some animal doing something to help/save its person, get to me much more than it would if the character were human. I think it's because we expect humans to know how to make the right decisions, so we take it for granted. It's always amazing to see an animal acting heroically (or whatever word I mean there), because we don't understand how they know what's going on.

And in movies, I always feel worse for the animals than humans in war/death scenes, because we're putting them in a place they wouldn't be naturally, and they are dying for it.