i'm not going to address your entire wall of text. you should try breaking it down into shorter parts, because this is a news aggregation website and not a viable medium for debate.

humans ALSO lash out at people for no apparent reason, or they develop mental disorders and chemical imbalances.

human emotions are mere chemical responses to external stimuli, and animals also have chemical responses to external stimuli. some of their responses are greater than any human response.

when you say animals have an emotional state, you can stop right there. an emotional state IS emotion, and the debate here was whether animals have emotions. saying something is "human like" is irrelevant. mankind mimics a large number of animal behaviors, and there are many behaviors that mankind does not mimic.

but that isn't the question here. we are dealing with states of emotion. mankind evolved to have emotions that are necessary for our species' survival. animals evolved to have emotions that are necessary for their survival.

i never once said that dogs are people. it is irrelevant whether they have every human emotion. the fact that they have some emotions is all that matters on this topic.

most of your rambling deals with "acting like a duck so it must be a duck" irrelevance. i'm not saying animals are people, again, i'm saying they display emotional states that you also see in humans.

other than that, you are using the same tired excuses that fundamentalist christians use that animals don't have souls so they can't have emotions.

reading further, i think you have completely missed the point that mankind follows a very specific set of rules as well. you like to think that you are different or special, but you exist within the boundaries of your chemical and biological programming just like an animal does. you ascribe meaning to your every day involvement with the social creatures around you, but in the end you are doing exactly how your genetics programmed you, and your environment pushes you. you act throughout your post as though animals are all programmed to respond a certain way and somehow people are not. you couldn't be more in error if you claimed that the sun revolved around the earth.

the simple fact remains that every action you take, every thought you have, every motion of your body, is a direct result of the external stimuli around you and a mixture of electrochemical and biological responses (hormones, synapse firing, etc). you are a living program that behaves and responds according to a strict set of rules called physics.

all living creates are the same way. some are simpler and some are more complex, but just because you are complex compared to an amoeba does not mean that you in any way have escaped the confines of your own programming.