In this survey, they finally proved that a dog didn’t actually feel guilty, but just act what you want it to act. I think a dog’s emotion trait forms after it born, and the environment it lives in does a great influence on its emotion. As we all know, dogs won’t have a greater intelligence than human beings—they are just animals. And that most of them have a short period of life. When we raise a dog, we usually get it when it was young enough( maybe 1 or 2 years old). Even a human baby won’t feel guilty, how can you suppose a dog at that age feel guilty? As far as I am concerned, “guilty” is too serious an emotion for a dog to handle. To answer the question of the title, I want to say that pet really have feelings, but not guilty. Of course they will have feelings like happiness or sadness. Let’s think about a baby. He will cry when he wants milk or foods or make a pee. He will smile or laugh when he find something interesting. And I think a dog’s feeling is no more complex than that. The difference is just the way they represent it.

I think if a pet has guilty feeling, it also has other advanced feelings like gratitude, jealousy, etc. But I think that’s impossible. Yes we do have many loyal dogs in the world that usually move us and made us cry. There are even many films telling about a loyal dog and its owner’s moving stories that reduce people to tears. Let me to explain that, I will give two possibilities. One is these are genius dogs that rare exist but really exists in the world. They are exceptions from what we are discussing. One is that the dogs are born with loyalty. They just don’t know what loyalty is, what they know is to follow their owners. It’s their natural instincts. And maybe it is because of phylogeny. I don’t know.
I have a cat last year. I saw it beside a field full of rubbish and dust. It’s a little dirty black cat that has little power to run at that time. So I easily caught him. After that, I took him to an animal clinic, cure his disease, buy him food, and wash his body. The doctor said that I pulled this poor cat back from the hell. My Mum asked me to throw the cat several times because of the flea made from its body. But I rejected every time. I took him as my baby. I didn’t know what he was thinking. But I can definitely guess him feelings from the first time in my home. He was so scared the first time. He likes to stay where there is no light. He got into the bottom of the sofa to sleep so that none of us found him for a long time the next day. But after that, I could feel it was becoming more and more relaxed getting alone with my family. Also, he was sometimes naughty, and sometimes well-behaved just like a child—silently lying beside me when I’m watching TV. But I think all his behaviors and emotions just illustrate his getting used to the new environment and gradually depend on this environment. It’s fairly simple and it’s definitely not the feeling like human beings. Likewise, a dog’s guilty expression is just the signal that it has got used to the environment it lives in.

I happen to believe that at the very least animals have some very basic emotions and that with good, consistent training they possibly will experience more complex emotions. I do not have a degree in Psychology and can’t say I’ve actively studied it for long but it seems to me that the process of child development is very much the same…

A newborn cries and that tells us she is either sad, hungry, or in some other kind of discomfort; as this child grows she begins to be trained in social rules and consequences which lends itself to guilt and pride.

Yes, this is a weak argument for the case of Pro-Anthropomorphism because I have to assume that dogs have the ability to develop similarly enough to a human child to process these more complex thoughts and emotions; however, the other argument, with little exception, doesn’t in my mind have a far better argument.

My thought is: is not all emotion based on some sort of pavlovian response to conditioning? I’ll be trolling the Development section to see if I can find anything here at the psychfiles to help me better understand this and see if I’m onto the right idea.

@Nathan – I’m sure I misunderstood, so I’m asking for qualification in the form of an observation: When we are presented ConditionA + ResultB = DataC, we cannot just conclude that DataC is faulty or weak because it conflicts with TheoryA. I’m pretty sure I misunderstood what you meant – maybe I need to go study Darwin’s Analysis of the Brain? – Any help you could provide on your meaning or where I need to go to understand would be appreciated!

Well, looks like I wrote enough to make my own podcast script – sorry and goodnight. (I felt guilt =P)