Thanks for the commend, I have seen composition used before and I should have included it.
So is that (Composition) the standard way of dealing with objects that have some things in common but something that are not? I'm just really curious because this seems to come up a lot in the couple years we've been using LabVIEW OOP, especially when you are developing HALs. For example lets say you have a power supply class. Most power supplies have a init, close, set voltage, set current, etc but occasionally you'll come across one that has additional (useful) functionality that the others don't have. If I want to make use of that additional functionality, do I start a whole new class hierarchy? If I do that then I've broken my power supply HAL. It seems like this should be solvable with OOP since its designed to EXTEND functionality of a class.
BTW, bark and meow were bad examples. I should have used something like cats can claw and dogs can track. Two totally unrelated functions that you can't easily attribute to just any animal.