Two weird events

[Thaliur]

Hello, fellow minecrawlers.

I have experienced some strange events during my second tour of the mines.

The first one was what I would like to call a "Ghost Wolf":

Spoiler below!

In the old mine, after I entered the workshop/cave-in/explosives section through the wooden wall and barricaded the door, one of the dieseased dogs in the tunnels apparently spotted me and smashed the door and my barrier.
That's when I thought I'd rather go up against it than be surprised by it later, so I readied my hammer and started fighting for my life.
I knocked the dog down close to the pillar directly in front of the door and waited for it to recover. Suddenly, I started getting bitten, accompanied by the usual growling one would expect under those circumstances.
I was a bit shocked, and thought another dog had sneaked up on me while I was distracted by the first one, so I turned around and started looking for that other dog, while still receiving bite after bite (luckily, that was on easy difficulty).
Then I tried hitting the firstdog again (which was still lying on the floor).
The biting immediately stopped.
Apparantly, the dog somehow managed to bite me telepathically.
Might be some problem with physics or animations

The other event occured later on in the game

Spoiler below!

While going through the "tunnel from times ahead" area, I approached the paraffin puddle, passed it, and set it on fire, then I tried to move the round boulder to the cave opening I came from, but as soon as the boulder touched the flames, the game slowed down to maybe one frame per minute. I eventually managed to put the boulder in front of the cave anyway, and immediately, the framerate returned to normal.
Maybe this was caued by lighting problems. But was it caused by my local graphics settings or some extreme calculations in the game engine?