As a professional wildlife photographer and someone who observes animals on an almost daily basis, I think if humans have anything called a soul, so does an animal, that we aren't anything special, and that animals deserve the same regard as humans.

It moreover seems hard to reconcile the idea that there needs to be some minimal level of intelligence to gain a level of awareness. In fact, several philosophers have thought this way also and have coined the term panpsychism to denote the idea that all entities of the universe have some level of sensing and awareness and that it is most concentrated in life forms.