If you’ve ever wondered whether your dog has emotions, then yes is the answer. Every dog owner comes to recognise their dog’s mood based on their body language and expressions. Another indication of your dog’s mood is its movements and vocal expressions. You’ll inherently know if your dog is happy, sad, frustrated, anxious or excited.

However, behavioural experts have long debated this controversial topic, mainly because quantifying or measuring emotions is very hard. Scientists cannot measure exactly how happy or afraid your dog is, so many of us tend to disregard emotions (and the fact that they play a vital role in how your dog learns to express and behave himself), even though your dog has a rich emotional life.

Facts about Emotions

Emotions are what prompt dogs to react to a situation or event, and also affect how they feel afterwards. For instance, the emotion of fear (a negative or ‘repugnant’ emotion) may prompt dogs to defend themselves, whereas positive feelings of contact and touch may create and reinforce relationships with other group members. Emotions can be broken into positive and negative feelings, both of which have different scales. As an example, your dog’s pleasure level rises as it feels happier due to feelings of contention and euphoria, whereas frustration may increase to anger and agitation, and trepidation to fright and distress. Most animals with a behavioural problem often head to the extremes of the emotional scale when displaying their problem.

Recent studies have established that every mammal, including dogs, possess seven fundamental, essential emotional structures that provide the capacity to respond to the particular information the senses feed to the brain. These seven include a system that hunts for food, a fright system to react to any possibly dangerous unknown occurrences, and a play and care system that aids in forming social attachments and raising offspring.

Further reports say that more recently evolved parts of the human brain are able to refine this emotional capability into complex emotions of affection, disgrace, hatred and concern, etc. Even if we do not associate such ‘higher emotions’ with dogs, this doesn’t detract from the fact that they experience additional fundamental emotions such as cheerfulness, unhappiness, distemper and terror in the same way as us.

 Emotional Difficulties

Acknowledging that dogs do have emotions has assisted in progress in various new grounds, such as dealing with behavioural issues, aggression, needless grooming, and anxiety. An evaluation is usually in three stages:

• An emotional evaluation of the dog immediately on observing a problem.
• A mood evaluation of how the dog typically acts and feels.
• A supporting evaluation of what causes, internal or external, are perpetuating the problem behaviour

By taking into account the emotions that dogs feel, other than merely observing their behaviour, animal behaviourists are currently getting to grips with solving these problems much more capably.