If it takes a team, then you don’t just need human intelligence; you need some way to coordinate. Which will be much more difficult than you’d think, without language.
I think you got them switched up… it’s the cat dollar and the dog pound.
After posting I realized that I should have been more imaginative alliterative and the Possum Pound and the Dolphin Dollar came to mind. Alas, it was too late to edit. Your post is as good an excuse as any to correct that now.
Galapagos tortoise.
This is something I often think about.
In the relatively distant future, we might devise the technology to change our bodily forms into various animals and other, more fanciful shapes. I doubt very much that we will be meeting intelligent alien entities at any time in the forseeable future, so we may be tempted to remake ourselves into alien and fanciful forms. But a society of foxes, or antelope, or snakes, would have little capacity for maintaining an advanced technological civilisation; no hands, and poor communication skills. Here are a few options I’ve thought of (there may be more):
1/ You could accept that a technological civilisation would not be possible, and simply be content with living like a fox, or snake, or antelope. Some people might like that. Note that if there are sentient predators in your ecology you might end up as the prey of an intelligent animal, or alternately be the predator in such a transaction. Would you want to eat something with human-level intelligence, or be eaten by such a creature? Maybe you could devise some sort of signal that would alert an intelligent predator to the fact that they might be about to eat a sentient being, and hopefully they would decline to do so.
2/ There is the possibility of an external neural network, something like the one depicted in James Cameron’s Avatar. If all the animals in the biosphere can commune mentally with one another, then a complex civilisation could be supported (although this would not be very much like our own current civilisation). Note that the neural network would need to cope with the predator/prey relationship as well, somehow, hopefully preventing sentient beings from eating other sentient beings.
3/ My preferred solution would be so-called handtech - that is to say, every sentient animal which does not have hands capable of manipulating the environment with precision could have a set of robotic hands available for their use, under their exclusive control. These 'hands might take the form of a separate robot assistant, a swarm of smaller servitors, or detachable prosthetic limbs (perhaps all three at once). This solution is similar to the one devised by Clifford Simak in City, one of my favorite works; the Dogs which are the heir to an abandoned Earth have (human-made) robotic companions, who help them run their doggy civilisation.
I think in due course humanity will be able to adopt a wide range of forms, and also may decide to raise various species in our biosphere to sentience, so this sort of decision may one day be necessary. I note that these solutions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they might not mix very well together in a single location. I also doubt that the solutions I have listed are the only ones.
If they were as smart as humans but just had animal bodies surely they could both reason and lie?
And I was going to say Gaia has banned people choosing extinct creatures but then that would be a good way to bring back say the Thylacine.
Well we’d need more than one or they’d quickly be extinct again. And different sexes. And be able to find each other. And not be on entirely different continents.
Hhhhhmmm…
You don’t have to fight, you can both be raccoons! 
Yes true, perhaps there would be a sort of agreed sign-language, but then not everyone has paws.
I’ve never heard of Digger, is it a book?
Thanks for the comprehensive reply, I’m glad I’m not the only one who likes to think about these things! Makes me feel a little less like a weirdo.
Have you ever read any of The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks? In that people are free to choose exactly how they want to physical appear, every so often there are fashion trends where a lot of people have themselves turned into various forms, snakes are specifically mentioned, but generally society has settled down into mostly humanoid shapes.
They also have sentient droids and other AI who are full citizens to help them out if they are in an animal or other similar body.
It would be a fun society to live in!
I’d be a 3-part hybrid creature, like a Chimera, with the agile body and reflexes of a house cat, the dexterous paws of a raccoon, and the head (including voice-box) of a macaw. Me and my kittycooncaw brethren would rule the Earth, and eventually the galaxy.
OK Gaia is definitely banning that one
I kind of imagined it as Gaia coming to everyone in a dream while they are asleep and asking what new species they want to be, its only when everyone wakes up in their new form that there is an ‘uh oh…’ moment, so it wouldn’t really be possible to co-ordinate species between partners or wider groups.
Of course only part of the world is asleep at one time so there would be kind of a wave of change as everyone fell asleep and woke up again, so there might be time for the later parts of the world to quickly decide something.
As well as completely freaking out.
OK Gaia is definitely banning that one
I kind of imagined it as Gaia coming to everyone in a dream while they are asleep and asking what new species they want to be, its only when everyone wakes up in their new form that there is an ‘uh oh…’ moment, so it wouldn’t really be possible to co-ordinate species between partners or wider groups.
Of course only part of the world is asleep at one time so there would be kind of a wave of change as everyone fell asleep and woke up again, so there might be time for the later parts of the world to quickly decide something.
As well as completely freaking out.
Sorry for the double post - this is pretty accurate to the scene in front of my PC right now.
Yes, I have, and they have influenced me greatly. Highly recommended. According to Banks’ mythos, Culture inhabitants have generally adapted humanoid forms, despite having almost complete freedom of physical form. I know it is only fiction sprung from Mr Banks’ imagination, but is it likely? Perhaps there is a factor that might make morphological conservatism dominant, in a civilisation with complete freedom of shape.
I think that sexual attraction may be one factor that limits the otherwise unbounded freedom imagined for such a utopia. Sexual selection acts on the evolution of species in the wild, steering the development of various characteristics towards apparently desirable goals. If the human psyche is attracted towards particular body-plans, then those types might tend to predominate, even if we had complete morphological freedom.
Maybe certain physical traits would become exaggerated from time to time, but that would be more akin to the vagaries of fashion than the long, slow changes due to natural evolution.
Oh, you are in for a treat.
It’s a webcomic; long since finished, decidedly odd, and well worth reading.
Ah that’s good to hear! And I admit morphological freedom as you put it is a kind of dream of mine, how wonderful would it be if we could choose whatever body we liked?
Excellent, thank you!
Parrots are really good at mimicry, but captive ravens that are exposed to lots and lots of human speech can manage mimicry as well. I imagine an intelligent corvid could probably talk as well as a parrot.
It isn’t the water that’s the limiting factor for octopi, but their copper-based oxygenation system.