I'm sure that the issue with the dog was obvious to most people who read this board, but I think it still needed to be explicitly mentioned. It's another piece of evidence that the mother unfortunately did not immediately understand how serious the situation was. I also don't claim that the child would still be alive if he had received the dog's water. The point isn't whether or not the child would have lived, the point I was making is that the mother's actions reveal that there was a lack of realization. We all have made mistakes. The point of this board is to learn from other people's experiences. I have learned several valuable lessons from this tragedy and the discussion here.