Animals don’t know time, and what they experience is life, with no account of what’s next or what was or what is. Time is has no meaning to them. It’s humans who have the ability to measure change and then call it time.
Meanwhile, you’re still using the definitions of time as written in science textbooks. Time is an abstract. We don’t really know if time is the fourth dimension or any dimension at all. We take measurements based on what we know of our neighborhood in the universe. We don’t know if time is useful for measuring the past or present or future events out there in the rest of the universe.
Time is relative to us, but perhaps not to the rest of the universe.
I believe animals experience consciousness similar to humans, even if their thought processes may not be as complex.
Consciousness is as big of a mystery as time is. I think they are intertwined.
I think even the laws of physics are really just descriptions of the rules of consciousness. Our consciousness processes our experiences according to these rules. This, in turn, creates a mental map of the universe as we have collectively experienced it. But the physical universe is not the fundamental reality. It is simply how we perceive reality from experience.
This includes time.