A dog's life

In modern life (and perhaps throughout human history), terrible thoughts often come to us. The thought this morning, for example, upon reading that a live teenage girl was found yesterday in Haiti, that the child had spent days under rubble, in pain, thirsty, hungry....And now found, will she survive?
    Or the thought that the final seconds of animals raised for slaughter can be spent in a "state of terror." From "Paperback Row," in the January 17 New York Times Book Review:

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.95.) This book picks up where Animals in Translation left off, but the focus here is on animals' emotional lives. "The rule is simple," Grandin writes [not Johnson?]. "Don't stimulate rage, fear, and panic if you can help it, and do stimulate seeking and also play." She has designed humane slaughter systems for cattle, arguing that "no animal should spend its last conscious moments in a state of terror" and that "the most important thing for an animal is the quality of its life".... [emphasis mine; p. 20]

We are more human that someone continued looking in that rubble, hope against hope. From the newspaper article (Associated Press) cited above:

French Ambassador Didier le Bret praised the persistence of the French rescue team, which has kept looking for survivors for days after the Haitian government officially called off the search.

And we are more human that we do the best we can to provide for our pets. I was thinking this morning that the original meaning of the phrase, "a dog's life," probably doesn't cover the kind of life my wife and I try to (and do) provide for Siegfried. Hendrickson's Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins doesn't cover the term. World Wide Words provides the pertinent insight:

Most of our expressions that include dog are old enough to be based in times when dogs were not cosseted, but were kept as watchdogs or hunting animals, not as pets. They often weren’t allowed in the house, but were kept in kennels, fed scraps, worked hard, and often died young. So going to the dogs, dog tired, to die like a dog, dog’s dinner, dogsbody, dog eat dog, and a dog’s life all refer to a state of affairs best avoided. Specifically, a dog’s life is first recorded in the sixteenth century and seems to have remained in the language with the sense of “a life of misery, or of miserable subserviency” ever since....[emphasis mine]

    But the same article points out that

Those of us over 50 seem to use [the phrase] to suggest the need to accept the existential fact that things are hard; but in the under-50 set, the idea is that dogs have it easy, and so it’s a dog’s life equates to "how cushy"!
    It certainly seems that the phrase has become more ambiguous than it once was, though I’ve not come across many examples myself of its use as a description of a pampered existence. [emphasis mine]

    Now, that latter sense of the phrase does refer to Siegfried!
    But what about those animals in the abatoir?