Many animals can count. Counting is recognizing that the box with 3 apples is preferable to the one with 2 apples.
Yes, 2 year olds might struggle with the externalization of numeric identities but if you have 1 M&M in one hand and 5 in the other and ask which they want, they’ll take the 5.
LLMs have the language part down, but fundamentally can’t count.
However many animals can distinguish independently small numbers, like 3 or 5, and recognize them whenever they see them.
So in this respect, there is little difference between humans and many animals. Humans learn to count to arbitrarily big numbers, but they can still easily recognize only small numbers.
This is called subitizing. It's distinct from counting. We can see the difference in humans with Simultanagnosia, who are unable to count beyond the subitizing range. Subitizing is categorizing the scale of a small gestalt group.
The only thing I've ever seen where an animal appeared to demonstrate counting (up to 3) without training was in rhesus monkeys (maybe also chimpanzees?), but even that experiment could be explained through temporal gestalt. (It's the only reason I know of for them to not have been able to go higher than 3 in that experiment in the context of many other things that they can do.)
The overeager do quite often confuse subitizing and size discrimination for counting, though. That's its own problem.