Poll: Do Dogs feel love?

[TheTaco007]

Do humans feel love? How do you define love? Emotion is just a sequence of chemicals being released into your brain. What chemicals we define as "love" is something that needs to be decided before we can know if dogs have it too.

 

[Ghengis John]

You could also argue that we are also pre-programmed to do and feel all those things as well in order to form a lasting bond with our mate to raise children and to form a loyal groups.

Let me ask you how you select a mate. Do you not get to know them, do they not have to impress you in some way, to attract and maintain your interest? To find things you have in common? Do you not look for desirable qualities? A dog does none of these things when it binds itself to a human. It is simply looking for someone to follow, someone stronger than itself to fall in line behind. It has no requirement other than a provider. Beyond that it would follow anyone, whether they pampered it or beat it every day. You can say that there are humans who trap themselves in abusive relationships ("like a whipped dog" they say), but on some level, at some point they choose. A dog never does. I definitely think that a dog can feel happy, or sad. And some masters make their animals happy and some make them sad, but there's an unshakable conceptual construct for a dog not of "love" but of "master". A dog's "love" isn't earned. So I have trouble looking at it as the same as a human's.

Affcorse, our friends the psycho-analists will call me antropomorphic or some BS psycho-babble, wich is why I did not become a pshyciatrist.

Well you are projecting human emotions onto animals. The most disturbing thing about people attributing their dog with love however is that all a dog is offering you is subservience. Is that what love is to some people? I'd like to think it's more than that. It can not offer you understanding for instance. It has no understanding to give. A dog doesn't know you by anything other than smell or the sound of your voice. It could never say, "Oh look, a bird, bassik loves birds I better show him this bird." So no. Do I think they feel a crushing desire to be near you at all times? Yeah. Is that love? For me, personally no. That's all.

 

[CloudyCandyx]

Despite the fact that dogs' brains aren't as sophisticated as ours, I do believe that they can experience love. Even if it's just associating their people with good things like cuddling and food, which makes them happy to be around their people.
But I do know that dogs at least recognize some people as people they want to be around. When I left for college, my dog was miserable for weeks. My parents said she whimpered a lot. Even on moving day, she was sad to see me go. Then when I came home to visit, she wouldn't leave my side and managed to jump in my lap even though she's a good size dog. She gets just as excited to see me every time I visit. I've heard of things like this happening as well when soldiers return home. I've seen videos of dogs being so overjoyed to see the soldiers, I just find it hard to believe that they can't love us.