> What would a dog answer
To me it's interesting that they chose to give a dog the ability to answer. Certainly the ability to speak like a human would factor in 'how much like humans they are'. It's a way of humanizing the dog, which introduces bias, making the dog more human than it really is.
There is no need to pretend dogs are almost people to justify treating them well.
Your mention of speaking just reminded me of a thought I'd had, regarding how we measure where animals' sit on the human-ness scale. I think that metric has a lot of biases in how we weight its constituent factors. I.e. how well an animal can communicate with us - which might be quite orthogonal to its intelligence. (For example an octopus)