I said no because I hate the word "soul" and all of its implications.

Dead is dead.

I do not believe in any sort of awareness after death.

Now. If however you are asking if animals can have an awareness of self.

If an animal can then have an awareness of others outside its own self.

If an animal can have the capacity to love or hate?. If an animal has the capacity to choose to be selfish or altruistic? If an animal can choose to kill for the joy of killing or if they will intervene in a thrill kill or even just bullying?

If that is what you are saying. Then yes. Animals are are way more self aware and conscious than we generally want to acknowledge.

It means we humans aren't that special as all those books say.

(Meaning): Soul
The original meaning of the word as it came down to us from the ancient Greeks: Soul or psyche (Greek: "psychē", of "psychein", "to breathe" ) are the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, memory, perception, thinking, etc.

There is no visible entity called soul which we can place under a microscope and study its properties.

(mass noun): Emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance.

They have as much of a soul as humans do. Which is zero.

numerous historical attempts at defining and catagorising a "soul" have either been debunked, proven to be untrue or highly unreliable.

there is no such thing as a "soul" or "supernatural energy" which is carried over or substantial to the existence of living things.

if we're going down this road, then why not consider the flora of the earth and say that has souls too? or is that too stupid to be taken seriously? plants communicate and share information which in turn helps them survive. they react to damage and they react to pleasurable stimuli. plants go to "sleep" too, they have cycles which revolve around sunlight and they even travel. when plants are cared for and are "happy" they grow stronger, faster and with much more intention to spread. badly cared for plants wither away, they seem depressed. but plants can't have souls because that's dumb. it's dumb because the whole idea of a soul is dumb. being alive is an amazing thing, it's rare and it's fleeting. to suggest there is reason for it, is to suggest there is no reason to carry on since your personally covered in your afterlife via the substance which would be called a "soul".

no soul. no afterlife. living things react to reality, that's just how it is. evolution made living things adopt a specific pattern of information gathering and management. evolution gave the biological brain many different approaches to development and sustainability, without the brain there is no living for a human or other animal. humans are animals. to suggest we're superior or different just because we're at the top of the food chain is hubris at best. we could have easily failed the test of the evolution of natural selection. but we didn't, we prevailed. many of us accept our responsibility and recognise our place in the universe and on the earth. the rest pretend to be special and superior because they don't realise how hard humankind have worked in order to get where we are today.

if there is such things as souls, then i am very upset to have one. an eternity of living sounds like nothing but disaster. to live forever is to be eternally bored, eternally ignorant and infiinitely dumb. why would two things fucking have any reason for the creation of a soul? are you telling me my testicles are housing billions of souls, all random and unsuspecting of living until i put my dick near an egg to fertilise it? or is the soul something which develops over time? is it universal or is it planted in there once one has earned it? before asking questions about souls belonging to other creatures, maybe a soul should be demonstrated first. it's a little far fetched to talk about something a creature may have similiar to humans when there is no record, no proof and no reason to think humans have that thing in the first place.

anybody who answers "yes" has to answer what a soul is first. they have to show me, and the entire world what a soul is, where it comes from, why we have it, how we get it, how we keep it, how to detect it and what it does. but those people don't exist. they just say "yes" to fit in and seem like they are part of a group which happens to know something which is unknowable and hasn't been demonstrated ever, at all, in the history of the universe. to all those people who say "no" i have a strong feeling it was chosen because of the lack of knowledge of what a soul is and why one would have it. they probably didn't select "no" through intellect or information gathering, they chose no because there wasn't any other reasonable answers to choose from, at least, that's why i chose "no" anyway.

There are no souls. Animals have brains and some have self-awareness and have experiences. Many kinds of animals demonstrate emotions, empathy, grief, joy, etc. Using the word "soul" to describe this is a poetic device and shouldn't be confused with an actual soul.

As for energy, they have chemical, and thermal energy just like we do. We have electrical energy but it's contained within the chemical compounds. When people and animals die, that energy is released in the process of decomposition. The heat dissipates, the chemical bonds break. There's no reason to think that our personalities continue to exist anywhere.

My definition of "soul" is the energy within us, so to that yes by all means if humans have "souls" dogs do too, and a lot of other critters/beings.
We all "vibrate" on different frequencies, some at a higher pitch than others, and some in the negative. Hey maybe we just wind up as static electricity on someone's pant leg, or a piece of stuck lint.
I can totally get on board with this and think some day another form of matter will be discovered and measurable if we don't render ourselves extinct first.

None of my entertaining the plausibility of it all makes me not atheist.

If people do then other animals do. We are all just another animal at the root anyway. We just happened to have opposable thumbs and a drive to learn, experience, and expand our realities.

Soul, well, I don't pretend to know for a fact that any have souls, I think the best description of a soul is inner empathy, in which case some people don't even posses one, but all dogs do. Ta da.

I would have voted no only because I don't believe that humans have souls so it seems unlikely that animals do. I voted "yes" only because I'm sick of people who put down animals as stupid or missing some key something. They aren't.

So yes, I agree with you. If humans have souls animals certainly do but the problem is, humans don't. We are an emergent phenomena and our brains are big. We seem to use a lot of that brain for our human-centric ego.

Neither do we.

They have personalities, intellect, know good treatment and are receptive to being treated well. They complete the balance of mankind and are responsible for much of our research into understanding who and what we are.

Animals have as much of a soul as people do. Can't prove or disprove it so let folks believe what they want.

I voted No, but that's because I don't believe in souls. The question do animals have souls?" Humans are animals and what animals have is life, life with consciousness. People speak of energy as if it's somehow magical, and I see energy for what it is, the utilization of physical or chemical resources. Life is astonishing and beautiful, and it's underselling it to call it magical or spiritual, it's real not an illusion. A soul is a word and words can mean whatever you want them to mean, but the baggage associated with the word soul is too heavy for me to want to associate my existence with a word like that.

Yes in the same sense as people. that spark in most of us that shows humanity and kindness.

When I think of all the animals I have known and loved I can't imagine they aren't made of the same life force I am. Whether souls exist or not, they are as intelligent and aware as we are. As you said, same energy, different vessel.

Nothing has a "soul". At least in the religious sense. IMHO

and neither do human animals. People who claim to have a soul are mistaken or liars. Your idea of soul or spirit is just conflating conciousness with those ideas. All animals with a brain have some level of conciousness, humans and maybe some animals have self awareness which seems to make some humans think they are better than other animals. We are in fact just a runaway species.

They don't and neither do you, except for to quote @Scottheshot "James Brown".

Yes, I agree. They have whatever we have, in their own way. It doesn’t bother me at all to call that “soul” even though I don’t think it’s anything supernatural.

If we've got them (and I feel I do, although, unfortunately, I feel it is mortal), then they do.

The funny thing is, I still refer to "my" soul as something that "I" possess. It's mine, whoever the hell "me" is. ?

I don't believe that humans have souls, so it would be hard to believe that my dogs do. BUT, if it turns-out we humans DO end-up somewhere else after death, well, I've lived a good honest life and will expect to see all my past dogs there to continue down the road together with me.

Animals have cognitive reasoning so why would they NOT have a soul. A soul is just the essence of life, so wouldn't all living things have a soul?

I would say that they have as much of a soul as humans.

You’re an animal. Do you have a soul?

Religious folks love to use that argument to justify their abuse of animals. I'm glad that i rejected religion.