Topic: I wonder how far goes the opinions of Duck Hunt dog?

Now, certainly for those who grew up in the NES era, that smug little... just made us all want to use the gun to blow him away. Even after we became adults with more sensitivity towards animal cruelty still perhaps think back to THAT dog and think "that's an exception, no mercy!".
(can remember in the mid 2000s seeing a good parody video where they grew up, and yet the dog continued to show up at their adult life failings)

But I wonder if those older who already had matured attitudes, were they less inclined to wish violence on even cartoon animals?

I'll go on a limb and guess many of the younger audience probably didn't play the game much or at all to really develop a feeling towards it.

It's just a silly cartoon dog. It's not as if shooting the dog depicts it writhing around in agony while it bleeds to death, in which case, I would be inclined to have second thoughts about shooting it.

On a similar note, I also sometimes feel bad for specific characters in fighting games (especially my girl Chun-Li in the Street Fighter series), and I'm not at all fond of the explicit violence in recent Mortal Kombat games.

Really, the dog is just another dead character from a one-shot NES game, like Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, Urban Champion, and Excitebike.