On Squirrelly Behavior

This weekend, I found a visitor in Carol’s fireplace: a squirrel! Just one and it appears to be curious, always trying to break into the house by finding a way to open the fireplace doors. To prevent it from succeeding, I placed a bar in between the two fireplace doors' handles, preventing the doors from being opened. It’s been working pretty well, thus far, as the squirrel is left to only pound itself against the glass doors and scamper out of sight whenever I walk into the room. On the plus side, the squirrel seems unlikely to get into the house; on the other side, since it’s been going on for several days now, the squirrel seems likely to die from dehydration before the exterminator arrives sometime tomorrow. It wasn’t one of those Sophie’s Choice kind of moments of course; I would infinitely prefer for a potentially rabid squirrel to die in a fireplace than be set free throughout the whole house, potentially biting, urinating, and being overally troublesome throughout the house. But, when I talked about the problem with friends, they seemed very concerned for the squirrel’s life, and I can only attribute part of that to the fact that one of them is a vegetarian, since I too feel emotionally connected to it. But, I wonder, what is so different from a wild animal dying in Carol’s fireplace than if it died in the woods?