To me, it’s not so much that animals have some version of ‘seeking meaning’ (anthropomorphising them) as it is that humans are less meaningful than we are conditioned to believe we are. Too many want to raise animals ‘up’ to our level, but we abandoned the concept of being servants of our environment and animals have not; because they don’t work that way. Humanity separated itself from reality with mental models that we didn’t really need and competition that is self-destructive. An animal will model its world and make use of that model: it just doesn’t believe in it as a methodology that must be escalated beyond useful action. Plants do so as well, but they store the model in genetic codes and work on different time and geology scales.

Thank you so much for all of your kind and thoughtful good work and responses.