sure anyone can be sympathetic to the situation, you are free to have those feelings.
The death of an animal no matter how it dies is never as tragic when a human being dies. So whether or not we make comparisons on what is worse or better for anyone. The death of an animal is no big deal. It's a bloody animal!
it's human to mourn the death of an animal. It's human to have emotions. There has to come a point where things like this are put into perspective. Especially the location of the soldier and why he is in Iraq where people are losing their lives and suffering because of this war.
What I think is disturbing is when we come to the point that we make pets or farm animals etc. as equal to humans. As one of our own as they say.
Wrong. Everything has a value only in a context. You might treasure a possession of yours that I don't give a shit about. So when that thing breaks, I'm not going to feel anything unlike you who is going to feel a lot of pain. In the same way, in your scale of evaluation, a person's life has a lot of value compared to an animal's life that has no value. In the case of someone like ~Flower~, the animal has an equal value, meaning she'd be just as indignant if the guy were throwing a baby or a kid over the cliff.
There are tons of lonely people and even normal people to whom their pets matter as much as a family member does. While to others, the same animals are actually repulsive. One group's preference or scale of value doesn't make the other group's opposing value true or false - every person decides what is important and what is not, what is worthy of love and what is not and so on.
