My newest addition to the household — a 15-month-old black cat named Deena — has had me thinking about trust issues lately.

I’m not talking about trusting her to not knock over the lamp on the end table (she already has) or not get into the artificial Christmas tree box in the basement and deliver pieces of it to me (she does, regularly). I’m thinking of the deeper trust that we develop with our animals: the one that causes them to trust human beings to an extent we may not always deserve.

Since the day I brought her home, Deena has displayed a fearlessness that sometimes just comes with felines — like walking right up to my Doberman and rubbing against his leg.

Mostly, however, she trusts me. Implicitly. Her favorite spot in the house is the left side of my head, where she perches herself whether I’m sitting or lying down. She rubs against it, then flings her back end into my ear and slides down in absolute ecstasy. I can swing her around and rub her tummy, and she doesn’t react by curling into a ball and biting or scratching. She just lets me do it.

I find this so odd for any animal to allow. Belly rubs are a favorite for many, but by permitting it, our pets are telling us that they have the utmost trust in us, because they are offering us one of their most vulnerable spots.

Why, then, do animals who have been abused place their trust in us so quickly with these soft spots?

I guess this has been on my mind because of something I learned just a few weeks ago from Midge Grinstead of the Lawrence Humane Society. We were discussing animal abuse, and as always, I ended up learning something I really just didn’t want to know.

See, it seems that the undesirable element of our community has found yet another way to take advantage of the trust that canines show the people to whom they look for food and shelter and general care.

It turns out that dog fighting, like everything else in our society, has gone mobile. Much like cell phones and texting and tweeting, now dogfights can be done on the spot. All you need is a car.

These pathetic cowards who think they are “someone” only if they have a vicious dog now bring their trained fighting animals with them to wherever they hang out. With car stereos blaring, they select two dogs who have trusted and served them well, throw them together into the trunk of a car, slam the lid and then wait around until the noise stops.

The “winner” is the one who survives.

It’s called “trunking,” and yeah, it’s happening in Lawrence.

I think about those dogs as I curl up with my own dogs and cats each evening and dole out the favorite type of attention to each one. As I rub heads or bellies or backs or rumps, I think about those animals who must live with the worthless criminal element of Lawrence, starved and abused and then thrown to pain and death without a second thought, their gift of trust discarded like a bit of trash.

And each night a part of me cries for every one of them.

— Sue Novak is vice president of the board of the Lawrence Humane Society.