That is an easy mistake to make. Animals are different. Humans are superior to dogs and probably all animals intellectually, but dogs are more spiritually evolved than humans.
That is an easy mistake to make. Animals are different.
On the other hand, it's also easy to make the reverse mistake, trying to "explain away" all apparently intelligent behavior in animals as somehow necessarily "mechanical".
There's a really good book on this whole subject entitled "The Human Nature of Birds". The author examines various kinds of bird behavior and challenges the reader to consider that it may be different from human intelligence in degree, but not necessarily in kind. As he says in the introduction, while it's probably a mistake to presume that behavior that looks intelligent (or "conscious" if you will) *must* be intelligent, it's equally a mistake to simply presume that it *isn't*. And the latter view ("presuming it isn't) has been the "accepted" position of most animal behavioralists over the past few decades -- the pendulum has swung too far that way and needs to come back from such an extreme outook.
One of his examples is the time a woman removed the top of one of the birdhouses in her backyard to clean it, thinking it was empty. She frightened a mother songbird on her nest, who flew off to a nearby tree. The woman quickly put the top back on the birdhouse and went back inside. She was amazed to see that about five minutes later, when the bird's mate returned, the female flew over to meet him and then started chattering at him. When she was done, the male flew over to the birdhouse, and *inspected the roof*. When he seemed satisfied, the pair re-entered the bird house.