Thank you for a detailed answer! I know about qualia somewhat and agree with you on every point but only with the degree of uncertainty that you show - you say “entirely possible” and “we can’t be sure” because of the same ideas you express earlier that feelings and emotions are immeasurable (maybe there is some top notch neurological method for quantifying/qualifying emotions or will be in the future but none that I know of) - we can’t be sure even with people, like you meet a person who seems to be sad and you approach them and ask what’s wrong you look sad and they would go like no it’s fine it’s just how my face looks like.

My idea is only that it’s stupid to say things like oh my cat is sad or dog is happy or tortoise is feeling fine, we just don’t know and talking with certainty about things we don’t know and can’t measure is dangerous in my book. Disrespectful is a word that came to mind because many animals suffer from abuse, but simply talking about their emotions is at least not abusive. With people we can at least verbally communicate ideas of our emotions but with animals we can’t at all. Maybe cats have something similar to boredom, maybe not; ennui feels like an even more strong and complicated emotion, so seems to be even less likely