If you have not read a book called "A Brief history of nearly everything" by Bill Bryson, I strongly recommend that you do. Besides being filled with the most amazing set of historical facts, it is well written and enjoyable to read.

Besides the many useful things I learned from this book I realized how little we actually know about anything. Despite everything we think we know about the earth, people,animals, plants etc., we actually really know only a very little about very few things in any depth. In most cases what we call knowledge is best guesses and speculation or surmising. The second big idea is that our existence, in our current form, our culture, our history and everything around us is dependent on a very delicate sequence of mutations over the span of millions of years. If any one happened at a different time or place we may not be here at all, or we may look very different, might not even be humanoid!

So what makes us think we are so superior as humans. We do not really know what animals are thinking, if they think. How do they really communicate? A mutation could occur tomorrow in a dog or a cat and survive and propagate that give that animal cognitive thought. They may already have it, we just do not know how to recognize it!