Never understand how parents think it's a cute idea to place a child next to a pet dog or cat. I love dogs and cats, I don't have one any more but I've had both in the past and I treated them good and respected them. But a lesson I learned from my parents was that all animals are unpredictable no matter how well you think of them. Cats and dogs grow to have the mental capacity of maybe a three or four year old human and never grow past that. The difference is that they have claws and teeth. So my mom would often remind me what might happen if you left a three or four year old sitting around the house with a little knife in their hands. You might train them to not use the knife and be careful with it ..... but eventually they'll end up cutting something or someone for no obvious reason, not because they are mean or angry or scared but because they just don't know what they are doing.