"I believe they even have been known to kill infants."

So have dogs, cats, and a great many other common animals that we take for granted and profess to like. We don't take rats for granted, because they don't appear to meet our immediate needs (emotional or otherwise). They are therefore considered "inconvenient" to our purposes. I can easily imagine how another society in a different time might regard dogs the same way: All dogs would be feral dogs in such a social order. No one would have ever thought of domesticating them. Therefore they would all be regarded as treacherous, unreliable, and dangerous. The roaming packs of those feral dogs would be despised for robbing food, killing livestock, and menacing travellers. They would even be said to have (gasp!) killed babies on some rare occasions!

You see, leeneia, our ideas about all these things are formed by one thing: Our culture. We grow up in a culture, and that culture plants a million arbitrary ideas in our heads. We quite arbitrarily decide to domestic some species as "pets" (dogs, cats, mynah birds, tropical fish, etc.), domesticate and eat others (chickens, pigs, ducks, cows, etc.), hunt and eat others (fish, deer, moose, wild ducks, etc.), and exterminate still others as hated "pests" (rats, mice, etc.).

It's almost all arbitrary what a culture decides to do...though it does appear to make sense within its own established parameters. You're born into it, you grow up believing it, and you obey it for the rest of your life. You develop standard reactions to dogs, cats, rats, mice, different kinds of birds, food, clothing, social ritual, etc. Why do people say "gesundheit" when someone sneezes??? Because they saw their parents do that! Well, it always seemed ridiculous to me, so I don't do that. I tend to challenge cultural habits if I can't see any real practical justification for them.

People should take a look at ALL their standard cultural assumptions about EVERYTHING from time to time and ask themselves, "Where the heck did this come from? Why do I believe it? Might I not believe it, given other circumatances? Is it real or is it something somebody made up, and no one alive now even knows why?

The Chinese and many East Asians eat dogs. Right now. Why? Because their culture says it's okay to do that. So it IS okay in their culture, but that's arbitrary. The Aztecs bred dogs to eat for the same reason.

It's arbitrary, leeneia. You might just as well have been born in a society where everyone kept pet rats and loved them, and thought it was totally normal to do that. If they did, they still might not like wild rats all that much...we have problems with wild dogs, after all, that's for sure...and wild dogs are WAY more dangerous than wild rats are. They'll kill you outright if a pack of them goes after you. However, you can't say for sure what people in that society would say about wild rats...because they are nowhere near as dangrous as wild dogs are. They might say, "Oh, look! A wild rat! Isn't he cute!"

So think about cultural conditioning a bit, okay? No culture has the last word on anything. We just make it all up as we go along. ;-)