They may not know they’re going to die, but they know when they’re in a pickle.
Stephen Pinker has a lovely soliloquy on the elephant’s trunk as a sui generis adaptation. He points out that you’ve probably never even considered arguing that other animals have a similar trunk–but that plenty of people refuse even to consider that human speech might be a species-specific adaptation. I suspect that our ability to form ordered, grammatical speech might be what sets us apart. Animals like dolphins or pigeons might be very intelligent in ways we barely comprehend (pigeons are much better at probability than untrained humans, for example), but our ability to create grammared language is such a flexible and powerful cognitive tool that it encroaches into every area of our lives.