First of all: please let us separate this. What one believes isn’t science. Science does not care for your (or a mollusc’s) feelings. It cars about what’s the provable truth (except when the science is psychology or behavioral biology, then it cares very much about your or the mollusc’s feelings). So if it can’t be proven, science will ignore it.

Secondly: there is something you need to take into account herey and that is cognitive abilities. It doesn’t matter how the behavioral response of an animal is, if said animal lacks the horsepower to interpret those feelings. Do you feel bad for a computer when it encounters an error? Of course not. Why would you? It lacks the cognitive ability to suffer from that error. Same goes for animals. Dies it feel compelled to be in a group? Maybe. But does that mean that inside the animal’s head it goes “oh, finally a group, I’m so safe now. I was really hurting being alone and all” or is there just a little mechanism that goes “Func_Search_Group exited with status code 0”?
We don’t know. All we know is that both exist. Dish forming swarms show more of the latter, while dogs display more of the first. if there is no psychological response to any given feeling, we can’t attribute emotions to it. Furthermore, all of this is only applicable if we assume that the way our mind works is the only way. Some animals might have a psyche that’s so far removed from ours that our metrics just don’t apply. We don’t know.

Of course there are tons of animal behaviors we wrongly Attribute to instinct or reflex when they are actually emotionally driven. Yet we don’t know what those are, so we cannot just run around and play pretend because it makes us feel cozy.

We humans are actually a good example of that. At birth, we are just a bundle of cobbled together reflexes that get replaced by cognitive ability over time.
I’m holding my three weeks old toddler in my arms right now and since he is actually a human,. observing his behavior is relatable to menand easy to interpret since he’s hard wired to communicate everything bad by crying immediately.

Yet, there is tons of behavior he shows that’s actually reflexes and his brain will not start the same reaction as a more developed human brain would.
Take shock as an example. He is literally impossible to upset by shock. If he feels like he’s falling or something else catches him by surprise, he’ll react by the so-called Moro reflex and try to grasp anything in his reach. It’s the same reflex we see in chimp babies. It’s meant to make the baby cling to it’s carrier’s fur. Yet, he himself doesn’t react at all. He looks midly irritated at best, if he doesn’t just continue sleeping and that’s all. His brain does not process this shock emotionally like we would, yet his body goes into full blown panic mode, desperately grasping around. No suffering, no anxiety, nothing in terms of emotions at all (and believe me, a baby will not hide those. He cries if his intestines are starting to digest the milk he just devoured)

If this kind of disconnect between behavior and psyche is common in humans, it is likely to be common in other species as well, especially when those species lack the ridiculous large and energy hungry brain humans have decided was a good idea?

Is it actually the scientist neglecting the mind of an animal or is it you wishing for a mind to be where there is none? The answer is somewhere in the middle.

Oh and the cat example: that’s a result of the very mistake you made: people have somehow collectively decided that cats lack any social behavior and thus anything they do that looks like socializing must be something else, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Cats absolutely do socialize just with less to no empathy for their friends. That’s why we can only call true what’s observable.

It’s because the show is based off of actual science and observed behaviors, not wishful thinking.

This comes down to a difference of approaches. People naturally anthropomorphise pets and dogs have abused this by evolving expressive eyebrows so that humans bonded with them easier. The grills of cars are designed like a smiley because people recognise the headlights as eyes and attribute emotions to unfeeling metal objects based on the shape of the air intakes and panels.

If all the chemistry and physics that make up an animal are all there is to life, then it’s not hard to reason about animal intelligence. There are things we consider to be very basic (pointing at something and expecting someone else to look at what we’re pointing to) that very few animals can grasp. There are special tests to determine self awareness, like if an animal can recognise a spot drawn on its body in the mirror.

Humans lack knowledge of animal interactions (and sometimes senses) to clearly determine what animals are communicating to us. We like to attribute intelligence to dogs and other common pets that look like us mammals, but squid and birds can beat intelligence tests that human toddlers struggle with.

There is also the philosophical approach. Do animals feel? Do they posses a soul? We have no way to exchange words with animals, so we’ll likely never find out. There has not been any proof of a soul in humans, but if you believe humans do have some kind of ethereal component that’s not visible to the naked eye, it’s not hard to imagine animals may have something similar.

Some people like to pretend we as humans are super special and above animals. I don’t buy that, I think we’re just smart monkeys, nothing more, and our emotions are just more complicated forms of “behaviourisms” we see in other animals. We do possess some insight that many animals clearly lack, but cats certainly do feel joy or loss. Cats are known to grieve, as are many other animals. Of course, they don’t have the spiritual concepts we do, and once they’ve processed the loss of their friend, they’ll probably eat the body if there are no other easy ways to find food, but to consider any mammal an emotionless creature that’s more akin to a robot than a living thing is nothing but a superiority complex.

Mollusks are some of the basic forms of animal we know of. They respond to chemical cues, just like us, but there’s no proof whatsoever that they possess any kind of mental faculties beyond basic responses. Maybe they do have a soul and maybe they have intricate love lives, but we haven’t found any evidence for that yet.

We may never find out. If mollusks do experience emotions, there’s a chance their emotions are nothing like ours. We explain emotional responses through happiness, fear, anger and all that stuff, but who says other animals feel the same? Perhaps sea creatures have an emotional spectrum comprised of degrencre, humber, nage, and dorcelessness, but we’ll never be able to understand those, let alone recognise them when animals express them.

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Do a web search for “What Is It Like to Be a Bat.”

But be warned: this rabbit-hole goes much deeper than you can imagine.