"Although I appreciate Tulving's conception of episodic memory, I've always been troubled by the difficulty of documenting that other animals have episodic memory. Episodic remembering hinges on the conscious experience of the self in some other time and place. Episodic memory is thus hard to demonstrate without the verbal ability to describe conscious experience."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...-dont-remember
This was noteworthy to bring up, as this has hindered our view about other animals for so long, before even more than now.
The baseline seems to be that other animals are dumb until otherwise proven. Maybe not the best starting point.