I think there are two different things called consciousness. The first is awareness of your surroundings. Yes, your dog is conscious, unless asleep. And even then it's conscious to some degree, because it can be awakened by external stimulus.

The second kind of consciousness is being aware of your awareness - being able to watch your mind work. To our knowledge, dogs don't have that. Nobody does but humans, so far as we know. The problem is, my definition here is a purely internal, subjective one. I can't prove to you that I am conscious in the second sense; I can't prove to you that anyone else is or is not. All I know is that this is something my own mind can do, and maybe I can describe a bit of what it's like to have my mind do it. That's not much to go on for further investigations.

To state, that humans are able to watch their mind work is simply wrong.

People who argue with the chinese room argument, are unable to prove, that they're not a "chinese room" themself.

Demonstratably, you don't actually experience doing so. When a solution to a problem you were thinking aloud about yesterday suddenly pops up in you mind today, you have 0 idea how your brain came up with it.

What you experience is only the pop ups.

Yes, I have had that experience. And how do we know it just "popped up"? Because we can watch our own consciousness, and we can see that it did not originate at the level of conscious thought.

So you mean unless you think an idea in words, you are not doing anything conscious? Does that mean I play a real-time video game entirely unconsciously? Because I don't think "I need to go there and do this" in words, I just do it.

Seen from my perspective this doesn't make you any more different than the chinese room, as you cannot prove your claim to observe your very own mind while thinking.

Am I conscious? How would I know?

If I'm capable of fooling everyone else, can I be fooling myself?

You can’t be fooling yourself into thinking you see color or feel pain. What would that even mean?