When you look your best friend in the eye, you certainly can’t deny that dogs have feelings, can you?In our daily lives, we build a mutual bond of friendship and trust with our furry friends. Every shared moment seems to be a test.dogs can experience various emotions and express them through body language or different vocalizations.
As a tutor, you learn to interpret our facial expressions, postures and hairy behaviors to communicate with them, and over time, you are able to quickly identify when your dog is happy, sad, scared or trying to ask you something..But what does this mean that dogs have feelings and reasoning or are it humans who tend to reflect feelings in dogs, giving them the characteristics and abilities of humans?
- In this peritoAnimal article.
- We’ll explain what science says about whether a dog has feelings toward humans.
- Other dogs and animals Read on to discover the emotions and feelings of dogs!.
Advances in science and technology have identified that several animals, especially mammals, experience basic human-like emotions; in fact, they have the same brain structures as us and process emotions in very deep regions of the brain, which form the limbic system.
Emotions are understood as a wide range of hormonal and neurochemical responses associated with the limbic system of the brain, which predispose the individual to react in a certain way when he perceives an external stimulus with his senses, interpreting it through neural activity.This interpretive process allows humans and many other animal species to experience emotions in different ways.
If you look at the animals in their habitat or your dog at home, you will see clearly that they react very differently to positive emotions, such as joy, and negative ones, such as fear.It is also clear that animals are sentient beings, which can develop emotional bonds with humans and other animals, as well as feeling pain and stress when subjected to a negative environment, abuse or abandonment.
But is that enough to say that animals have feelings?Next, we will better explain the difference between emotions and feelings in scientific terms, focusing on the key question of this article, that is, if dogs have feelings.
Many people wonder if dogs have feelings or instincts, but the truth is that these are two very different things, instinct can be defined, in a very brief and simplified way, as the natural and innate engine that leads a living being to react to various stimuli.It is inherent in the nature of animals, passed down from generation to generation by genes, as an adaptive capacity that allows them to survive.
Despite having gone through a long process of domestication, dogs also retain various instinctive behaviors, such as hierarchical instinct (also called “herd instinct”), hunting instinct and the “habit” of marking the territory.But that doesn’t mean they’re unable to feel or experience different emotions. Instinct is an integral part of canine nature and the ability to have emotions or feelings is unaffected by the preservation of instinct. Human beings themselves also retain certain behaviors associated with the survival instinct, which could be considered the most fundamental and fundamental instinct of all species.
Not exactly. We will tear apart to better understand why the claim that dogs have feelings is so incomplete.As we have seen before, dogs have emotions (like many other animals) and experience them in a very similar way to that of humans.One of the most important studies for this discovery was conducted by neuroscientist Gregory Berns of Emory University, who decided to train several dogs to adapt to the magnetic resonance imaging machine (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which captures images of brain activity.Why can’t we just say that dogs have feelings?
Because psychology traditionally differentiates emotions from feelings, as we have seen, emotions consist mainly of neural, chemical and hormonal responses that predispose the individual to act in a certain way in the face of a certain stimulus, for example, joy is an emotion.that can make a dog smile upon the arrival of its owner at home.
In turn, feelings are also associated with the limbic system, but involve conscious evaluation, as well as a spontaneous predisposition to certain responses.It is not possible to think of feelings as emotions, because they would arise precisely from conscious and general reflection.about emotions, mainly considering each individual’s subjective experience (how each individual lives his or her own emotions).
Thus, the main problem we have today to say that animals have feelings (including dogs) is that our knowledge of their cognitive system has not yet allowed us to check if they are consciously thinking about their own emotions.Not having scientific evidence to show that dogs and other animals are able to relate the specific emotions they feel in certain contexts to complex thoughts about this experience.
Let’s say that to pretend that dogs have feelings beyond emotions, your furry would need to reflect on the joy he feels when he sees you coming home, to come to the conclusion that his spontaneous reaction by moving his tail vigorously or smiling is due to the affection he feels for you, but to date, science and technology have not yet demonstrated this kind of complex and reflective thinking in dogs.
Thus, although we know that animals and dogs have emotions, we still cannot scientifically state that they also have feelings, and also for this reason, dogs are not considered to have feelings of guilt, because to feel guilty they would need to think.about something they’ve done that is considered negative or undesirable in our culture.
The dog’s body also generates oxytocin, better known as the ‘love hormone’.Another important observation of Dr. Berns’ aforementioned research is that the most positive neural response in all dogs occurred when they noticed the smell of their “favorite human being”, stimulating a region of the brain known as a caudate nucleus, which is associated with love in both dogs and humans.
When the dog notices the smell of his guardian and therefore also of his home, this entails an increase in the production and segregation of oxytocin, and this is what allows his hairy to look happy and excited when he sees you or shares good times with him.You.
In addition, a study by psychologist Andrea Beetz found that dogs and humans experience a very similar increase in oxytocin levels after sharing a 10-minute session of affection and care, so they both enjoy the benefits of this interaction, and dogs love it.how humans like to be in the company of those who do good to them.
However, in addition to occasionally experiencing an emotion or a sense of well-being when they are with their guardians, dogs also have an excellent emotional memory, which is also associated with well-developed senses, so a dog can be very happy to be reunited with a person or another dog, even if they have passed months or years since the last time they were seen.
Logically, dogs do not express their affection in the same way as humans, because the social behavior and body language of dogs are guided by different codes, so probably your dog does not feel comfortable with a hug, but shows affection in a totally spontaneous way.way, mainly through his unconditional loyalty.
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