I would not hesitate, the waggly tail lives.

The real question is how far I would do down the line I could go, murders, no problem, rapist, pedophiles, more of a problem, but the dog still lives.

Where it would get murky for me, is an animal I don't know and people that have done bad, but not real bad.

The good news, never a choice I will have to make.

I would clone her if I could, no I wouldn't, but it is going to take a long time to find another BC/Pit mix, which in my non-objective opinion is the best mix eva.

That being said, I strongly disagree with the notion that pets/animals don't remember.  Their conception of time is chaotic, but they remember things that have been done to them, the good and the bad.

Although you wouldn't want one to balance your checkbook, dogs can count. They can also understand more than 150 words, and intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats, according to a psychologist and leading canine researcher.

I saw a show where they placed balls on a TV screen, then they fell off the screen.  The sign of intelligence was whether the dog looked behind the TV for the missing ball.  That IMO is behavior above any 2 year olds.

And this made made laugh because it's so GD true:

During play, dogs are capable of deliberately trying to deceive other dogs and people in order to get rewards, said Coren. "And they are nearly as successful in deceiving humans as humans are in deceiving dogs."

That is your argument, seriously.  Dogs could have words, presumably English, imprinted in their DNA ?

I championed a gorgeous dog though 5 yrs ago.  God she beautiful.  She seemed to have it all.  But when my grandchildren were over playing she would not stop watching them through the window and growling.  I put her down.  No dogs over children here. And when I explained to my vet what she was doing he was great with it. But he deals with bad situations all the time, heading off a really bad occurrence was preferable in his book.

As someone who majored in Biology with an emphasis in Ethology in college, if there was one thing my Professors drilled into me it was that with regards to behavior you never declare anything as a "scientific fact". What you have is a scientific theory that is supported by experimental evidence and it is subject to change in the light of new evidence. And, in some cases specially when you are testing on animals there is a limit to what experiments can test.

The problem with testing Episodic memory as this article explains is that there are slight differences in how episodic memory is defined and as such the tests/experiments are not always testing the same thing. These tests were done on humans.

The next couple of articles are experiments based on animals.

Dogs

Scrub Jays

For me, this is the most important takeaway from the article.

it is important to recognize this point made by anthropologist Charles Mendel of Georgia State University: "animals are using something related to episodic memory, but not necessarily the same as in humans...animal memory systems have always been underestimated---the upper limits are not really known" [5]. It is true that the memories of non-human animals are still being explored but because of the obvious language barrier, the extent to which their memories reach may never be unearthed.

I don't think we will ever have a clear understanding about episodic memory in animals unless they start to speak.