I had a dream a couple weeks ago where I was reading some news about penguins developing a language to talk to each other. And in the dream I was wondering if we as humans were in any way hindering the penguins' capacity to evolve into a sentient species - then realized they were already so close to us. They have arms and legs, can use tools, talk with a structured language and everything - what kept them being labeled as plain animals if they did all that?
In the afternoon I suddenly remembered the dream and for a split second was kinda agreeing with my dream's argument, until I realized the penguins in the dream were closer to Animal Crossing characters than to actually penguins.