When doing this item in a review, I checked out the alternate grammar solutions and noticed this one:
I understand that だからです can be used to state, for example, “Because it is a dog.” (犬だからです。),
but to me this particular usage seems strange. I guess maybe it would be translated as “Because I am a dog liker” or something like that?
Nothing strange about it.
わたしは〇が好きだ means “I like 〇“.
犬好き (いぬずき) without the が would be a dog lover though.
For understanding 好き, it helps to either speak a little Spanish (it works more like “gustar” than it works like “like”) or to watch Cure Dolly’s YouTube videos on Japanese sentence structure.
Alternatively you can think of “suki” more like “please” than like like.
私は犬が好きです。
As for me, dogs please (me).
Yeah I was specifically confused about the です after the だから. To me this sentence reads like “I am because I like dogs.”
Maybe to make my question more clear, から in this context is connecting a cause to an effect. If I said 犬が好きだから, this implies to me that either some resulting action will follow, or it is a statement referring to a previously asked question (“Why did you pet the dog?”).
I was just going to recommend the cure dolly video. Because I think that’s what he got wrong too.
@Slysoft To me it looks like you are trying to make “私” the topic of the sentence because that’s how it looks in english. But really it is “犬” that is the topic of the sentence and it is just saying how it relates to “私”
What our boy @rikvg said is really what I think the correct LITERAL translation of the sentence is. But bunpro doesn’t really do literal translations, the translate the “spirit” of the sentence.
The video rikvg is, or at least I believe, he is, referring to is the following:
Cure dolly is a bit different than a lot of japanese youtubers but I’d say Cure dolly is 20x the teacher that anyone else I’ve seen is.
But also I’m still learning too 
It’s more like, “It is because I like dogs.” The Bunpro translation leaves off “it is” because this is strange in isolation, but coincidentally, so is 私は. You should think of this sentence as being yanked out of some context in which the speaker is justifying something they said or did. The 私は has a contrastive or emphatic feeling, and it calls out that the given reason is the speaker’s. “As for me, the reason is I like dogs.”
私 is the topic, actually, since it’s marked by は, and 犬が好きだ is a predicate of 私. In sentences like these, が acts more like its marking an object (which is how it translates in English). In fact, while uncommon, 好き can take を instead of が. I think this usage is mostly limited to poetic language, though (like this song);
I like Tae Kim’s description of が as the identifier particle. It better helps to understand why が should not be thought of as the “subject particle,” which it sometimes erroneously is called. It’s also important to distinguish between the topic and subject. Japanese is a topic-prominent language, and sentences often feature null-subjects.
I was taught that the topic is what the action of the sentence is happening to. Which is the dog, the dog has the action being liked happen to it. But that being said I don’t really know my ass from my elbow when it comes to japanese. So you probably are right. Also I’m not going to lie to you I’m not reading any of those articles. Especially that Tae Kim because I don’t like the explanations (I just absorb nothing from them)
Anyhow I did hunt the exact video which is once again by Cure Dolly (Who is my favourite)
At the 5 minute mark she covers a sentence that’s basically the same as the sentence asked.
So you may or may not be right but the way I’ve been taught (which is just via a video and not a formal education) tells me that you are wrong. And I guess when I was saying topic the correct wording is “logical topic”
I can’t watch Cure Dolly (the voice makes me want to rip my hair out), so I can’t speak to what’s being taught in the video. All I can say is I’m using the terms “topic,” “subject,” “object,” and “predicate” in technical, linguistic terms. Other people might use the word “topic” differently, which is fine for instructional purposes, but I prefer to use the acadmic terminology because it’s well defined and more precise.
the ~だからです is just a type of emphasis. It has a matter of fact type of tone. In essence it means exactly the same thing as だから, but grammatically that would just half a sentence without a follow up phrase. Where as with the です at the end it technically completeness the sentence.
Though in real Japanese hung sentences are ridiculously frequent; so again, in practice the meaning is identical with just a modulation of tone.
I think is a naturally translate to write it like a sentnce that starts with because, as it captures the same effect/sentiment that the Japanese conveys. But a slightly more comprehensible version in this case is:
“It is because I like dogs.”
This feels like an answer to a question like: “Why do you work at an animal shelter?” And you are explaining that you have a straightforwardly transparent motive.
As much as I don’t understand how people choose to trust some random youtuber who isn’t even willing to show their face or any sort of credentials and barely speaks Japanese over the work of teachers and linguists who studied the language for decades and have the academic record to prove it… in the video she does call 私 the topic, and the item being liked the subject, which is what @wrt7MameLZE33wlmpCAV also wrote, so I’m not sure where you got you idea that the item being liked would be the topic. Maybe there is some other mixup though because you also wrote that 私 being the topic is what it looks like in English - but English has no grammaticalized topic, “I” would be the subject.
Not that this thread is the place, but I am curious what your issue with Dolly was?
I feel like both Tae Kim and Cure Dolly are grossly oversimplifying the whole は・が thing when it comes to expressing likes/dislikes/desire/etc.
On one hand, we have Tae Kim saying that が shouldn’t be called the subject particle because according to him, there’s no such thing as a subject in Japanese. Isn’t that a bit… misleading, don’t you think? In a sense, I agree that が shouldn’t be called “the subject particle” since marking the subject is not its only purpose. And he rightly notes this by saying,
"The most simple conclusion, if you insist on thinking in English, is that the 「が」 particle can either represent the subject or the object of the sentence. "
On the flip side, Cure Dolly says that は doesn’t mark the subject of the sentence, only the topic, because the subject of the sentence is actually marked by が.
But she completely ignores the fact that が can mark an object of desire/preference/capability, etc.
And if you’re unsure that this is true, simply look at how a Japanese dictionary defines all the uses of が (this is from Daijisen via Weblio):
２ 希望・好悪・能力などの対象を示す。「水が飲みたい」「紅茶が好きだ」「中国語が話せる」
Thus, in these kind of sentence structures, the linguistic subject of the sentence will either be implied or marked by は.
From a pedagogical standpoint, these kind of oversimplifications are supposed to help demystify Japanese particle usage… but isn’t it just easier to say that は and が can perform double duty sometimes?
私は犬が好きだからです
So, I am going to explain this in my own way, because it’s the way I understand it.
は - says what world something is happening in.
が - discusses events within that world.
私は - Within my world (immediately disincludes everything that is not ‘me’. Simply states that the sentence is about me, and I am an unchanging entity.)
犬が - Dogs (が coveys that the information I am about to convey about dogs is something that is open to change. It is a current fact within ‘me’, but may not always be that way.)
好きだ - Are in the state of being fond of
からです - from which, I currently exist.
Therefore -
私は犬が好きだからです =
Within me, the state of dogs being something I am fond of, is from where I am conveying this information.
This is terribly long in English, but the closest I can do to a literal translation.
Especially in colloquial Japanese. And から is a very frequent find at the end of those hung sentences, sort of the way we can sometimes end sentences in English with, “so …” or “but …” (けど). For instance:
A: Where do you want to go to eat?
B: I’d like to get sushi, but …
Here the implication of “but …” is almost unknowable, and this exact same thing happens in Japanese. You have to look at context (and perhaps even know B’s life circumstances) to know what that “but …” means. Japanese is no different in that respect.
You may very well be right about Cure Dolly (haven’t watched the video(s)). I had the same misgivings about Tae Kim’s treatment of が at first, but it does strike me as anything but simplistic. He addresses how diverse が’s usage is, and why using Western grammatical categories like “subject” and “object” make for an awkward fit.
Whether or not Japanese actually contains subjects depends on how you define them, but I’m inclined to agree with you (not Tae Kim), and as a topic-prominent language, sentences frequently contain null-subejcts (which the author of imabi.net calls “zero-pronouns”). I’m not sure if Tae Kim has interacted with those ideas before, which may be why he asserts Japanese doesn’t have subjects. Linguistically speaking, this is impossible, as the concept of subject and predicate are interrelated, and you couldn’t even make simple declarative sentences without a subject. Even if the term topic is to be preferred, it still functions as a syntactic subject quite often.
I believe that when Tae Kim says が isn’t the “subject particle,” he’s speaking from a pedagogical perspective. He’s trying to disabuse learners (esp. English speakers) of the idea that が always indicates the subject of a predicate. He agrees that sometimes it does indicate the subject (making a concession to English terminology), but then also shows sometimes it doesn’t. His epithet–“identifier particle”–also has merit when you consider how が is distinguished from は in its roles of introducing new information, distinguishing among options, exhaustive listing, etc., though I don’t think any singular English term can adequately describe が, hence why “Japanese grammarians have … published countless papers on the topic in attempts to solve the age-old question.”
Comprehensively, it’s a fair–if brief–survey of the topic.
Did you happen to read the full article? Tae Kim in fact says this very thing.
I really like the Tofugu podcast episodes (it’s a 3 parter!) on は vs が, which uses 好き as an example of what’s going on here. It was that explanation that finally made it click for me.
For a shorter version, I also think Asher’s explanation above is really good. As mentioned, the confusion comes a lot from the translation of the adjective 好き to the verb “to like” in English. If you said something like 「私は犬が可愛いだからです」, that construction intuitively makes sense because “cute” (or likeable or adorable…) is an adjective in both Japanese and English, and we know it applies to the dog.
because cure dolly explained it in a way that made since and wasn’t an egoist about it who only used confusing words. maybe explaining the concept instead of the fancy language words helps some people >:c
Did you happen to read the full article? Tae Kim in fact says this very thing.
Yeah, and I acknowledged that he said that in my post. I think you and I both realize the merit and his intentions in his blog post, but I just feel like Tae Kim winds up complicating things for learners by entrenching himself in a controversial opinion like “there’s no subject in Japanese,” and then dogmatically pushing his coined catch-all to reconcile how が functions differently in different contexts.
I agree with his points, I just think they’re expressed poorly.
I think this thread got a bit derailed from the original point. I don’t have any trouble understanding が vs は or whatever. Maybe I should more specifically spell out what I was initially confused with:
Full sentence: 私は犬が好きだからです。
私は・・・。 “As for me …”
私は犬が好きだ。“I like dogs.”
私は犬が好きだから。 “Because I like dogs.” (either a trailing sentence with an implied second clause or referring to a previously stated concept)
私は犬が好きだからです。I just don’t understand the purpose of this second です. It seemed redundant to me.
Fair enough 
Adding です to 犬が好きだから basically adds, “It is …” to the beginning of the clause.
私は犬が好きだから
Because I like dogs私は犬が好きだからです
It’s because I like dogs
Like I said earlier in the thread, and as others pointed out, you need to imagine this example sentence being taken out of a conversational context in which the speaker is replying to someone who prompted them to give a reason.