[RobertMiller]

No of course not, animals are soulless automatons without any relatable emotion or reason that humans could ever perceive let alone understand. Anybody who thinks otherwise is just deluded by anthropomorphization and overzealous pattern matching.

An angry dog? No such thing, anger is a human emotion. A happy dog? Again, no such thing. A sad dog? Never existed, sadness is uniquely human.

[pdonis]

You could be correct, of course. Your viewpoint is basically the same one that Descartes argued for 400 odd years ago.

Or it could be that you personally can't empathize with dogs or other animals, so you think they have no feelings. (IIRC some people made that criticism of Descartes.)

The major difference with humans as compared to other animals is that we can use language, which means we can describe what we are thinking and feeling in elaborate detail. But that does not mean animals who can't use language must necessarily have no feelings at all, just because they can't describe them verbally.

The way to investigate this question is not by dogmatic pronouncements but by looking at evidence. People who spend a lot of time with animals use much the same nonverbal cues to read their emotions as we all do with other humans. Since in both cases predicting behavior based on those cues works reasonably well, it is reasonable to conclude that the underlying causes inside the animal or the person are at least somewhat similar.

[k8sToGo]

Because humans are not automatons of eating and reproducing?