I just had a chat with my kindergartner about humans being a kind of mammal, and out of some dark, musty recess of my brain crawled the sound of "You are a human animal"[1]
You are a human animal
You are a very special breed
For you are the only animal
Who can think,
Who can reason,
Who can read.
Now all your pets are smart, that's true!
But none of them can add up 2 and 2
Because the only thinking animal
Is You! You! You!
I thought about it for a minute and declined to share that with my son, because I don't think it's true and would cause confusion at this stage. Many animals have more than enough number sense to add 2 and 2, many can recognize cards with nothing but words on them, and "think" and "reason" have to be pretty narrowly defined if you want to exclude smart animals.
I think culture has shifted significantly in the last 30-60 years since that song was written towards recognizing theory of mind in animals. I'm not sure how Jimmie Dodd could convince himself that animals couldn't think, especially because the average person today has reduced exposure to animals: 150 years ago, most people would know that horses had that kind of social interaction, because most people lived around horses. They'd know that pigs and cows are as intelligent as their family pets. But today, most people interact with pigs and cows via shrink-wrapped styrofoam at the grocery store. My personal theory is that when people were constantly surrounded by animals they had to kill and eat, they were far more likely to build up rationalizations and cultural assumptions to fend off the dangerous idea to their psyche that these animals could suffer and they were participating in an unavoidable horror of massive proportions.
[1]: https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/You_Are_a_Human_Animal