A squirrel in an attic or eave sounds like the aliens are coming to get you. Seriously. It would freak anybody out.
If your motion sensor lights didn't come on, either they don't cover the area very well, it really was nothing, or whoever did it is some kind of ninja. Maybe the slow blade penetrates the shield.
If she really saw the door knob turn (I used to see my bi-fold bedroom doors slowly open throughout the night when I was a kid, but they were never actually open at any point in the night) I can imagine how scary it was. However, on her own property, CCW laws are irrelevant. She could be carrying a pistol around the house, or at least when she walks 50 yards out from the house alone at night. I would. I absolutely would not leave a shotgun out in the kennel where he might find it just by poking around out there--or grab me on my way out, before I get to the kennel and the shotgun.
The dogs, though. . . . it's true. If there were an intruder outside trying to get in, or even faking it to scare her, the dogs should be going nuts. My dogs will literally try to go through windows. If she thought there was an intruder, putting a couple of dogs on leashes and opening the door would do the trick. If there's no one there, you just keep them on the leash. If the dogs are well-enough trained to roam the property, that's better. If there's no intruder when you let them out of the kennel, they'll automatically range out and check the boundaries of "their" property.
More than once I've gone out back to investigate what I thought of as a suspicious noise, only to look down and realize my dogs were playing happily beside me. That told me I probably had nothing to worry about.
