How graphic is the dog murder?

What's it matter either way, you know it's not real so just tell yourself that, it's hardly "Badlands" now is it.

It depends on how you are comparing values. IQ? How they taste? Looks? IQ is inappropriate to base whether an animal should be valued. What about humans with low IQ? Should they not be valued? It's very anthropocentric to think that animals are only valued based on what they can do for humans. Respect and value should be based on sentience. That's why some people choose not to eat any of them.

A pig is at least as intelligent as a dog and most of us don't hesitate to eat it. The question I'd like to ask to someone reasoning like you is: why is the degree of intelligence the factor that determines what is ok or not ok to kill? The capacity to suffer isn't linear with intelligence, stupid animals can suffer as much as smart ones.

And more importantly: if we use intelligence as the dividing factor between kill and no kill animals exactly where that line is drawn is a subjective decision, not something absolute. What stops someone from pushing the limit of what she accepts is an acceptable level of intelligence for killing into human territory? There are animals (most notably primates) that are more intelligent than certain human beings with certain mental defects, this implies one might decide that some people are ok to kill and eat whereas some animals are not. What about small children, a dog (or pig) is most certainly more intelligent than a three month old baby?

If you think about it you have to conclude that intelligence is not a sufficient determining factor and it leads to seriously flawed conclusions. In fact, the only principle that's of morally complete and consistent enough is to make an arbitrary decision that killing human beings is wrong and killing animals is ok. It's still not a very strong position and morally it's much easier to argue for strict veganism, but if we want some kind of moral framework around acceptable and unacceptable that is as good as it gets, the alternative is that either everyone is free to decide on case by case basis if it's ok to kill or that we construct a detailed categorization for each and every species and situation that is not based on some general guiding principle but subjectiveness and feelings which is of course not ideal.

Much agree ...(in text or whatever) I think you are sayin' things need to happen ( in context of the movie).