Actually you are right. It's in the Bible. In Genesis 1: 24, the Bible says "Then God said, “Let the earth produce living creatures according to their kind: livestock and crawling things and animals of the earth according to their kind”; and it was so.
The Hebrew word for creature is Nepes (with a bunch of crazy pronunciation marks). Pronounced Nephesh. It means soulish and is translated soul in other places.
For instance Genesis 2:7 Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. That last word "being" is "nephesh"
So, it isn't definitive that they do, but you can't say they don't have souls. The scriptures seem to imply it. in my humble but very educated opinion.
There is clearly a conscious being there. What is the soul? Does anything not a soul have consciousness? Or does consciousness emanate from the soul? To me it’s clear.
“There’s someone looking at you through those dog eyes. Those eyes aren’t just there for decoration!”
If you are a creature with consciousness, you are (not “have”) a soul. Key is “according to their kind”, so all creatures/souls are not created alike. May be why the term “higher animals” was coined.
No one will convince me that our pets aren’t souls, though in a different way than we are. I was granted the privilege at the passing of my first cat (who’d been with me for half my life of 36 years then, and had taught me the meaning of unconditional love for the first time), not to actually see his soul depart, but to witness our other 3 cats watch it. I was in a middle-of-the-night vigil, watching him sleep on a bunch of blankets on the living room floor, the other cats nestled around me, when all of a sudden, at once, they all got up on their feet and stared at the same spot above him, following its motion higher up until it disappeared. At that moment I knew, and didn’t have to feel for a heartbeat to tell that he was gone. A week later, I had a very realistic dream about him being his young self again, and in good hands. I never had those experiences again, and I’ve had dozens of cats since. It was as if God was showing me something, though.
Just the convictions of an uneducated person, other than in the School of Life...