Perhaps you are just used to those yapping little stupid toy breeds I am barely willing to call dogs, but tell that to my grandmother, who bred and worked with show dogs for much of her life, and she'll laugh in your face before proving you dead wrong.JoJo said:
For one example, she once owned a Great Dane who was... selectively destructive when irritated at something my Grandmother did. Not just to the point of chewing shoes or ruining furniture or anything generic and widespread like that, but behavior that was clearly intended as minor revenge. On multiple repeated occasions, the dog would seek out the specific book my Grandmother was in the middle of reading, pull it and only it off the shelf among all of her other books, and destroy that without touching anything else. She never destroyed books at all on other occasions, and never destroyed a book that wasn't being currently used.
As for emotions, learning to read the body language of an animal is quite simple so long as you do not make the (unfortunately common) mistake of projecting humanoid body language onto them. You are correct in stating that such language is not universal, and that communication of abstract concepts is not possible, but that does not by any means indicate that we cannot understand at least some of what they are thinking and feeling, or that they cannot understand the same about us. I've mentioned before that I work on a beef cattle ranch, primarily as a mechanic. I don't mess with the animals directly very often, but when I do, I constantly have to be aware of their mood, and modulate my body language to get the desired response. If understanding their emotions and desires was impossible, the only way I could get my job done would be by the threat of and/or application of brute force, which when dealing with highly excitable creatures that weigh in around 1000-2000 Lbs (or more with some of the bulls) is not particularly safe. Weirdly enough, I couldn't even be threatening to them from the relative safety of one of the trucks, they don't seem to understand that a vehicle is far more capable of causing them harm than the relatively tiny little sucker getting out of it.
University studies have their place, but don't under any circumstances forget that there is a huge difference between what you can understand about an animal through basic biology, and what can be learned by directly working with the animal in a manner that requires knowing as much as possible about their moods/desires/intentions. I'm not just talking about pet owners here, I'm speaking about people in a wide variety of roles, from veterinarians and animal psychologists, to ranchers and zookeepers.
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