Dog Tackled by 'Hero Cat' Put Down

While Tara the cat has become a celebrity after saving her owners' 4-year-old son from a dog attack, the dog involved was euthanized over the weekend. The 8-month-old Labrador-Chow mix who bit the boy and tried to drag him down his driveway before the cat intervened was put down with the consent of the owner, reports the Los Angeles Times. Police said the dog, which was surrendered to an animal shelter in Bakersfield and held in quarantine for 10 days, was "not adoptable, for obvious reasons."

But before the dog was put down, at least three online petitions to save it gathered thousands of signatures. The shelter's director says there were also many calls and emails from people who wanted to save the dog, some of them calling shelter staff "a disgrace" or cowards. "We're getting called names. I don't get it," she tells the Bakersfield Californian. "We did what the family requested we do. The owner signed over this dog specifically for euthanization after the quarantine period."