I'd put it in different terms (I'm sort of allergic to 'purity' arguments, fwiw), but I don't disagree.
For example, I have a cat who is amazingly good at expressing what she's feeling in the present moment. It has only been over a long period of time that I've been able to understand what motivates her beyond the present (the things she's somehow deeper in-tune with than everybody else around here). These are complex social engagements, and I get something non-species-specific from how she pays attention to details and why they're concerning her. This ties back into your point because there is an intense localness to these drives. Humanity, on the other hand, has taken the impulse toward global consciousness so far that it has now become a necessity. For me, it's kind of a wonder to behold her freedom from our world, and the correctness in her demands to see her world participated in by the rest of us.
(This'll sound crazy, but wtf.... She is incredibly conscious of me and my girlfriend's sleeping patterns. There have been several times that my girlfriend (and, to a lesser extent, me) has woken up from a bad dream to find her already on her way over to soothe her. With a very job-like focus, she will proceed to lay on your chest and produce a heavy purr. Distant stare. She'll leave to her own napping place as soon as breath is calmed and sleep is nigh. Before this, I didn't even know she'd taken up the position of nightwatchman; and had no idea how attuned she was to the types of stirs and other motions. This is subtle stuff. I eventually realized that she must have some cat-theory about our dreams, which she somehow presides over. When I was piecing this all together, I realized how often people appear in my dreams in miniature, and then realized they are approximately cat-sized. Freud [Interpretations of Dreams, his best, IMO] would argue that's because she is visiting me during the most intense and memorable image-producing part of my dreams, and that my body registers that visit by resizing things.)
There's an incredible maturity in animals and kids. I don't think you're saying otherwise, but sometimes that point gets lost in our common-sense ideas about kids and animals. I hope my example demonstrates my appreciation of that.