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If someone was willing to use lethal force against this particular dog, then he'd be willing to use lethal force against me.
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To justify deadly force, you'd have to be able to convince a jury that a reasonable person in your place would legitimately be in fear of imminent danger of death or bodily injury.
If, as in one of Jim243's example, you were in your house and someone broke in and attacked/killed your dog, the combination of illegal entry to your house and aggressive action would probably make it reasonable to assume that once they disposed of the dog, you'd be next. If you could articulate that and the jury/grand jury/police agreed with you (which I suspect they would) then your actions would be upheld as legal.
On the other hand, if the dog is out in your back yard while you're in the house, and a neighbor kills it for barking, the use of deadly force to retaliate or punish the neighbor would be a felony crime.
What it comes down to is that killing or attacking the dog, in and of itself, would not be sufficient legal justification for the dog's owner to use deadly force against the dog's assailant.
That would be true nearly everywhere. There may be one area in the U.S. where a person (unwisely) might be able to legally justify shooting to protect the dog using property protection rules assuming all the criteria of the law is met.
So additional circumstances of the situation may combine with the attack on the dog to warrant a deadly force response, but in my opinion, a critical component for any such set of circumstances would be that you or a family member were in very close proximity to the dog when the attack took place. So close that a reasonable person would assume that the attack was not just directed at the dog but was an attack against both the dog and the person.
Or, if you want to look at it from the other side--if the circumstances warrant the use of deadly force in defense of you or a family member then deadly force would be justified. In other words, for the most part, the fact that the dog was attacked or killed would be incidental to an imminent attack on you or a family member and it would be an imminent attack on a human (you or a family member) that would actually provide justification for a deadly force response.