You have to be careful about describing an animal's emotions, even more-so with assigning language to animals. You brought up leaving a dog without food. It ver

You have to be careful about describing an animal's emotions, even more-so with assigning language to animals. You brought up leaving a dog without food. It very well might hope you come with food. But the sensation it is feeling is hunger. From its behavior, you understand it is hungry: it whines, runs around, looks for where the food normally comes from (you/owner). But the dog is not saying "I hope I can get food." It's not saying, "If I have one hope in the world, above all other hopes, I hope my food would come." Because it can't say that. That's our language, us, assigning concepts to the dog. I'll put a similar quote, for my argument, from the philosopher PMS Hacker who has written extensively on this topic: "Animal life is full of fear; human life is also full of hope. Only human beings are aware of their mortality, can be occupied or preoccupied with their death and the dead. We are unique among animals in being able to strive to understand our lives and the place of death in life.... The horizon of possible thought is determined by the limits of the expression of thought; but with us, unlike other animals, those limits are set by the linguistic expression of thought. If one has mastered the use of tenses and of temporal referring expressions, one can think of the past and the future. One can remember not only where – as exhibited in an animal’s seeking or homing behaviour – but also when. Non-human animals may prepare for the future – bury food for later consumption, build dams or dig burrows, but only man can plan for the future. If a creature has mastered a language with logical connectives and quantifiers, then and only then is it possible for it to conceive of general truths, to think both of how things are and how they are not, to think both of what exists and of what does not exist, to think conditional thoughts, and with the aid of tensed verbs and modal expressions, counterfactual thoughts." This is from Human Nature: The Categorical Framework, pg.238, published 2007. I had to pull the book out to get the quote right lol.