As all mammals share the same neural apparatus, they are therefore capable of experiencing similar emotions. The same portions of the brain get fired up while experiencing emotions like excitement, anger, sadness, Jealousy.
“The amygdala is one such example, and it’s pretty ancient evolutionarily speaking. So since our brain is hardwired the same way as an animal’s, the theory is that it makes intuitive sense for similar stuff to be going on up there,” was reported on HowStuffWorks. So, it is this part of the mammal brain called amygdale that is responsible for our feelings. And dogs have it too.
Is your Dog Jelly?
Christine Harris, an emotional researcher at the University of California, San Diego, conducted an experiment designed to test the theory that jealousy is a primordial emotion, and she used one animated stuffed dog that could bark and wag its tail, a jack-o-lantern and a pop-up children’s book, as items for triggering jealousy.
“One-third of the dogs tried to insert themselves between the owner and the animated dog, and one-quarter snapped at the fake dog. One dog reacted aggressively to both the jack-o-lantern and the pop-up book.”
However, dogs also tried nicer ways to win their love back. “These weren’t just aggressive acts they carried out. They tried positive things like being more affectionate to regain their loved one’s attention, to try and gain their relationship back,” said Harris.
On the other hand, skeptics claim that it’s difficult to truly detect whether or not animals have emotions because of something called anthropomorphism – humans projecting their own features onto animals. Others theorize that animals may have “developed emotions in response to adaptation to different situations, for in the wild animals do not learn social niceties.”
All we know is that our pooches get super jealous whenever they are neglected, so we have to make sure to give them all the love they need.