'Talk' to the Animals?

Asking the basic question whether 'humans can ever understand how animals think', seems a bit premature. Behaviour, is a means by which many animal species can increase their DNA's chances of survival in subsequent generations (it's 'adaptive'). Behaviour often enables the organism to more effectively exploit its environment and to deal with change. Behaviour seems to be always an amalgam of genetically-programmed responses and experience-related changes. We tend to call the former 'instinct' and the latter 'learning' (but all behaviours probably have components of both in different ratios). The concept of 'thinking' is linked to the learning component. The concept of 'thinking' animals has currently more salience because it's been gradually recognised that certain skills (like self-recognition, language and estimating probabilities of reward) are not exclusive to Homo sapiens (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/may/30/can-humans-ever-understand-how-animals-think). It actually seems unlikely that 'thinking' is an identical process in all humans. Different folk have different what are referred to as 'cognitive styles'. One must consequently conclude that the 'cognitive styles' of different species are going to be even more varied. What's important to different species will vary a lot. They also rely on complex mixtures of senses, again potentially very different from human 'experience'. Perhaps it isn't important to know how animals think? What may be more important, is to recognise that animals shouldn't be regarded as automata. Some have quite complex capabilities. How they arrive at their solutions isn't necessarily going to have direct parallels to human cognition.