No. She’s feeling exactly what she says she’s feeling. Dogs also feel exactly what they express. I don’t accuse any animal of dishonesty.
Really, I seem to be failing to communicate my stance; I’ll think about it some more.
The thing you seem to be saying that I agree on is that the *actions *of animals in love or feeling love should not be assumed to be the same as the *actions *of a person in love or feeling love. And to some extent, that’s true, and I think it gets more true the further away from humans you get on an evolutionary tree. A loving bird protecting her offspring might be inclined to fly in front of a dog, feign a broken wing and limp away from the nest to draw off the dog. If I was protecting my daughter from a dog, I’d be more likely to make myself as big as possible and bark, “NO! GO HOME! BAD DOG!”. But I think the love - the desire to protect our offspring, rather than ourselves - is the same, even if our ways of showing it are different.
Dogs and humans, though. Man. Like I said upthread, even our behaviors in showing love are pretty much the same.
I think it might be worth noting that not only do humans recognize emotions in dogs we see that dogs recognize emotions in humans. Your dog will be very quick to recognize (say) fear or anger or happiness in you. Is the dog dogopomorphizing you?
Fala, FDR’s Scottie. According to Eleanor, after her husband died, Fala definitely missed him:
Or our dog, Lexie. Now, my mother is Alpha, in that she feeds everyone in the morning (she gets up earlier than everyone else – 4:30 am, for some ungodly reason!), she’s the one who trained the dog, etc. And yet, Lexie’s favorite is definitely my father. She follows him around like, well, a puppy!; she always sits in his lap after dinner, and he’s the only one she’ll go on a walk with. (Just like my mother is the only who can get her to take a bath, or go outside). So Mom’s the Boss, but Dad’s is her Buddy.
Another odd example – Buffy used to actually like “talking” to my sister on the phone, when sis was away at college. Mom one day was talking on the phone to Sis when Buffy hopped up beside her, and heard Baby Sis’s voice through the phone. Well, she got all excited and started purring and rubbing up against the phone. After that, whenever Sis would call home, she’d have to “talk” to Buffy, who’d go nuts.
Or when I’m going up to bed – if she’s downstairs, I just have to say, “Buffy?” and she’ll follow me upstairs (actually, she’ll run ahead of me!), and then sleep in my room. (Where she’ll climb on my pillows) She always tended to favor me, even when she was a kitten.
I think I’d argue that the tendency of animals to “favor” various members of the family might be an argument for the “pro” side.
My aunt’s dog, Carol, was extremely attached to her, to the point that when my aunt was in bed for a week with the flu, Carol wouldn’t leave her side. She lost about three pounds, (because she refused to eat).
Even if that’s true, so what? You could say the same thing about babies. A newborn infant doesn’t have some kind of sophisticated understanding of your uniqueness and value as a human being. What they have is an instinct which allows them to recognize and bond with the people who are caring for them. That doesn’t make them parasites.
If human love only counts as love because they love due to choice, then children never love their parents and parents never love their children.
Then he must have been misquoted in the OP, because that was a criticism of dogs.
Sorry, but I was talking about the OP - I don’t think I need to have read every part of an author’s works before I comment on one line in a superficial way.
That’s part of it – the same internal state might not lead to the same behaviours. But similarly, I think the opposite is true, as well: that similar behaviours might not be caused by similar internal states. Think about cats and dogs: dogs growl when irritated, and wag their tails when they’re happy; cats purr when they feel contented, and move their tails about when they’re pissed off. There’s quite some potential for misunderstanding here – a cat, thinking that it’s plain obvious that the sound the dog is making is one of happiness, might try to snuggle up to a dog who’s got anything but snuggling on his mind; similarly, a dog might find himself with some surprise scratches on the nose despite the fact that he knows that moving tails mean friendliness. I don’t see any good reasons why similar misinterpretations might not occur between dogs and humans.
And what’s even more, the same internal states don’t even necessarily exist across different species – monogamous animals might feel (some form of) love for their partners, while that concept is unknown to species that form no permanent attachments within breeding pairs. And even in two different monogamous species, there’s no real reason to assume that what they feel as ‘love’ is the same thing, particularly if their family trees branched off from each other before they became monogamous (don’t know if there actually are such examples, though). Still, a couple of million years of evolution can always introduce changes even if everything started out pretty similar.
So, between all those things – that similar internal states may not lead to similar behaviours; that similar behaviours not necessarily indicate similar internal states; and that similar internal states may not even exist – I think there is some reasonable doubt that dogs feel love as humans do, and that to say that they do can only be over-generalizing. Again, because I just know somebody’s gonna misunderstand this, this does not devalue dog emotions in the slightest. Quite to the contrary, to my mind – it shows them the respect they deserve as individual beings, rather than squeezing them into human-centric categories and basically turning them into quasi-human facsimiles and substitutes.