Every dog lover wonders what their dogs are thinking at one point or another.

I think I’ve read just about every book on the subject.  Many are quite certain that they know.

The short and honest answer is that I don’t know what a dog like Zinnia is thinking. Dogs are dogs, not people. We just don’t know what is going on inside, only what we see on the outside.

We are just beginning to realize that dogs have emotions, but the truth is they don’t have our emotions, which is where many dog lovers get led astray.

The scientists and dog psychologists had trouble, the experts say, because often confuse emotions with feelings and/or instincts, a difficult topic even for the scientists who study humans.

When we are conscious of our emotions, we can express them in words and get other people to understand them.

People see emotions in our faces, writes Fran De Wall, the author of the very wonderful book Mama’s Last Hug, but they learn our feelings from our mouths.

We tell other people that “we are happy,” and people believe us unless they can see from our faces that we are not.

The idea that animals feel emotions the way we do makes scientists and biologists uncomfortable, mostly because animals like dogs can’t report any feelings and partly because the existence of feelings assumes a level of consciousness that most scientists (and people like me) are not willing to grant to animals.

“But considering how much animals act like us, share our physiological reactions, have the same facial expressions, and possess the same sort of brains, wouldn’t it be strange indeed if their internal experiences were radically different,” asks De Wall.

DeWall is honest enough to admit that this is speculation on his part. No researcher ever got a grand for writing about what he or she didn’t know.  People are desperate to learn everything they can about dogs. There’s big money in it.

Yet if read as many dog-thinking books as I have, you will understand right away that biologists and researchers have no consensus on this subject. They just don’t know what is happening in the parts of a dog they can’t see.  We project everything else we think and feel onto dogs, so why not the ability to think and reason like us?

De Wall concedes that feelings are less accessible to science and animal lovers than emotions. For now, he says – I’m with him on this – we have to content ourselves with what is visible on the outside of animals, especially dogs.

We really don’t know that dogs are thinking anything. And we are a long way from figuring it out.

Dog people love to believe what their dogs are thinking, and they just fill in the blanks with the feelings they would like them to have. Since dogs have no words, we put ours into their heads.

Animal emotions are the next big frontier for biologists in the study of animal behavior, says DeWall.

When I look at this photo of Zinnia, it seems to me she is showing interest and attention more than anything else. Sometimes I take her for a walk; sometimes I take her outside to throw a ball, sometimes I feed her and give her a marrow bone.

In Zinnia’s eyes, I see interest and hope that I will do something good for her.

I believe that dogs are the most hopeful of animals. In my case, I’m on the pathway to good things for Zinnia. Hope is one emotion I see in her and all of my dogs. They never give up hoping it’s time for one more biscuit, one more walk, one more ball-tossing in the yard.

Dogs are psychics, I believe, when it comes to reading people. They know by the light when it’s come to eat, by our body motions, eye glances, shoes, and boots when we are going to give them something they want, and they get excited.

Does this mean they think and reason like us or are simply using their instincts to determine what they need and show happiness about it? There is a difference between a dog who is smart and one who speaks fluent English.

Zinnia is visibly happy and excited when she sees me put on my boots, get the dog bowls out, or look as if we are going to take a walk. But I don’t believe she thinks how I understand the term. Dogs like Zinnia are very smart about the things they need to know – food, for example – but not so smart about everything else.

Someday, the brainiacs will sort out the fusion between instinct, emotion, feeling, and habit. Until then, I’m happy to say I just don’t know what my dogs are thinking.

And I’m happy to leave it that way. People seem to think they must know everything a dog might think of feeling. I’ve given this up. They are entitled to their privacy and to just be dogs.

They don’t need to be little Freuds as well.

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