Dogs can certainly feel emotions. There isn’t any doubt that they feel fear or jealousy (as someone mentioned above).
It’s only human arrogance which assumes that “love” is somehow special and different to those emotions and that only we alone can feel it. There’s no reason to assume that dogs can’t feel love; they, like their other emotions, can feel emotions even if they don’t understand them or explain them.
An intelligent dog has as much reasoning capability as a 1 or 2-year old human. We certainly wouldn’t use that logic to try to claim that young humans don’t feel emotions.
I too think that it is reasonable to assume that they feel emotions. Last night as a prank I poured water on my sleeping dog. She was so miffed she wouldn’t let me pet her for a few hours.
Only if by “love” you mean some warm feeling or emotion. You can not like someone and choose never to be around them but still love them in the sense of wanting good for them. That’s why we need to define what we mean by love before attributing it to animals.
I don’t think it’s arrogance to say that humans experience emotions in a different way, as informed by humans’ unique reasoning. Dogs feel fear in an instinctual way as a survival deal, but they don’t feel the fear of death or the fear that someone will leave them. They don’t see the instrinsic worth in people beyond what it means for them. Very young children may very well be the same way.
How do you know she wasn’t “miffed”? Maybe it was nothing more than stimulus-response like you are saying, but dogs are social creatures that can be expected to have social emotions. And they certainly seem to have moods, like being happy or playful or “miffed”. They aren’t slugs or frogs you know; they are mammals with the brain and emotional complexity that implies.
If that were the case, she would avoid me after I have bathed her. She hates to be bathed, She knows that is my touch and presence doing the bathing, but does not avoid me after. Indeed, I could list several things I do for her good that she associates as a negative experience, but after which she does not avoid me. Being brushed, nail trimming, bathing and others.
Those things all have a precedent - you have trained her with simple conditioning to accept them without distress. They don’t happen to her out of nowhere when she is sleeping. If you were to grab a sleeping dog you did not know who had never experienced a bath and throw her in a tub of water, I can guarantee she would have a negative and distressed reaction and be shy of you afterward.
There has been tons of solid, peer-reviewed studies about how animals learn and experience the world. They are certainly not robots, but they are just as certainly NOT PEOPLE. There are also large bodies of literature detailing all this information as well as many books for the layman about dog training, behavior, and mental capacity.
There is a world of difference between being ‘frightened’ and being ‘miffed’. In the first case the animal is smart enough to realize that something negative has happened at the hands of a person or after a certain action on there part, and that it might happen again. Hence they will avoid the person who has hurt or scared them for a time until they feel more confident it won’t happen again, or they try to appease the person by giving them submissive social signals. What they are not smart enough to do is realize that you were joking and be annoyed by your puckish sense of humor, and seek to punish you by avoiding your touch. Simply not possible for a walnut-sized brain.
You cannot say with any certainty what a walnut sized brain can do. We do not have sufficient understanding of how the brain works. With a very very large supercomputer we can simulate the way the neurons in a cat’s brain fire in reaction to stimuli, but even with that supercomputer, the simulation is considerably slower than a cat’s brain (somewhere between 80 and 1000 times slower) - and is still only a simulation. We have much to learn about how a cat’s or dog’s brain represents and processes information.
Consider a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. One has a little brain. One a much bigger brain. Despite that they are equivalent in doing what it takes to be a “dog”. Little brain pulls off the same thing as the big brain.
The weight of the average dog brain (allowing for the large size variation between breeds) is about 2 ounces. The brain size of dogs does not scale up as much as you would think with size - small breeds have a much larger brain proportionately than larger dogs. The weight of the average walnut in shell is about .65 oz. I have seen the disembodied brain of a bulldog in person, and it was a bit smaller than a black walnut from my backyard (it had probably shrunk a bit from the preservative, though).
In contrast the average human brain is 48 oz.
For anyone who is interested in learning how much we know about how dogs learn and experience the world (quite a bit, after a century of research), here are some links:
