—In Israel you are obliged to assist, or you may afterwards find yourself in risk of being prosecuted. Hopefully, society hasn’t reached that stage of apathy yet. Obviously, this is a very hypothetical ferinstance; it is too clinical, and does not suggest a realistic situation.
As I mentioned above, had my (rescue) dog jumped into the river to save a drowning man, but had gotten injured in the head whilst doing so; I’d try my best to save the man, of course, while keeping one eye on the dog – even if it meant losing it. In the Hebrew language, there is no “It”; everything is either male or female, masculine or feminine.
When I wrote “it” for dog just now in English, it became clearer to me why Hebrew, the ancient language of Moses (but without getting too religious here, because I happen to be secular – thousands of years before English) has only a he/she word for dog. The spoken, and of course written word can be very powerful: if you have a dog, and its name is Rover, and you refer to “him” all the time, this might affect how you feel towards “it” – just like you would to another person.
But if its a dog, then it is a thing, an animal with a name. Certainly not some_thing_ you’d save before the life of a fellow human, n’est ce pas?
I am not 100% sure about this, and it wasn’t thought out – I just wrote this while thinking about it in both languages. Make any sense jellies?