As I was growing up around animals, I had an insight derived from my interactions with a particularly adept cat. She had an affinity with people and made an effort to communicate.
Vocalizations confused me. There isn't enough information in them to encode all of her demonstrated use cases. Maybe I could not hear everything. Wondered about that for a while.
One day, it sort of hit me: Cats, at least, are missing a layer of abstraction. To them, thought is very nearly action. We experience a similar thing when we reach mastery of some manual skill. You just do it, not think about it, then think about doing it, then do it.
Cats do not appear to present a facade like we can and do. They simply present as they are.
Given this, a "meow" isn't so much an encoding of thoughts as much as it is a signal to pay attention right now. Like a context tag of sorts. It does also contain some emotional information, urgency, concern, fear, pain.
When the cat chooses to vocalize, what it is doing is making its current context known, and marking that as important.
A meow near the door may sound almost identical to one by the food bowl, for example. In both cases, say there is urgency: I want out, or I need to eat.
We hear the cue to pay attention, and we see the context, may be a tail movement, or a walk or dance, and process the emotion to get a sense of what the cat wanted to communicate to us.
We have a layer or few, where how we present may be contrived, or managed and or very different from our other thoughts and state.
They don't. Thoughts are actions, their lives are stories.
Since that time, I have found my ability to understand cats has improved. When we get it, they will often make more of an investment. The dialog is surprisingly rich.
Other animals seem to do similar things. Body language is significant. How they position themselves, where they do that, dancing, other things all contribute to what can be fairly complex expressions.
They are similar to us. They think their thoughts, they feel a lot of things, they bond, and they often can make plans, and or understand a lot of the world around them.
Much of their thought appears to be spatial, emotional, boundaries, and other necessary things. And when around us, they pick up more, have reasons to do and think more, given we actually do interact with them.
Yes they think. And it's complicated for some animals, less so for others.
I feel work to better communicate is worth it. When I make investments in animals, they get close, like people do. I can feel the bond, and that little spark that is "them", it's a'll just simpler, smaller, and quite often much faster.
By faster, I mean their rate of perception seems much quicker than mine. And they have profound capabilities, such as hearing my call amidst so much noise it should not be possible. Maybe their simple nature and speed brings a type of attention we do not generally have.
Dogs and smell. To them, a sequence of smells, for example, is like sights for us on a road trip. We go somewhere special, and the dog rolls in some crap.
Why?
To bring the story back to the pack. And when all the smelling and such is done, the others will know if they too ever go there, or that one member did and stuff happened, such as food, or a hunt.
My take on all this. I remain completely unable to understand insects, for example. They are just too different.
But most common animals? Yeah they think, they make choices, they have preferences, seek comfort, bond with others, all that good stuff beings are into and or need.
Someone would have to make a hell of a case to move me off that understanding.