You're trying to explain why you think animals can think. The desire and the ability to explain things, and not thinking per se, is (I guess) what distinguishes humans from animals.
But how do you know that animals have no desire or ability to explain things to each other, at least amongst their own species? We may not be able to read it, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, we already know that a parent can 'teach' its offspring that something is dangerous, for example among elephants this is even fairly easily observable.
I'd be interested to know the original sources and the rigor of the tests, though.
>They can’t conceptualize that there could exist a mind of thoughts and feelings outside their own.
Presumably they don't have a concept of their own mind either. And this is despite being quite sophisticated and hosting a bunch of memes related to things like tool-use:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10071-011-0403-...
Whereas primitive humans painted pictures of themselves on cave walls. Which seems like an early attempt to explain themselves to themselves.
> and culture is something animals haven't yet developed.
I know they don't have movies and such, but they do seem to have dialects, activities and behaviours based on various, (including location-based) factors even among the same kind of animals that one could classify that collection as being a 'culture' of theirs, no?
I think this mindset of trying to map everything 1:1 to humans might be robbing us of a greater understanding of the universe in general, like looking at planets that have water and an atmosphere of some kind as with probably having life. There is no need for other kinds of life to need water or oxygen per se, so why we seem to be focused almost exclusively on it?