Yes, animals are, on a fundamental neurological level, also neural networks. But they don't have a system prompt. They don't have a loss function. They don't have a hard-coded network architecture. They don't have an attention mechanism. Animals, at least chordates, have a degree of autonomy with which an AI cannot cope, because in the absence of these things it will just shut down and do nothing. But to live, animal brains must keep working. To keep working, they have to learn, keep developing themselves, and make sovereign decisions. Such decisions can be influenced by genetics, instinct, reflex, or utility calculus, but animals are able to rise above that. They frolic in the snow, they get drunk off fermented fruits, they form social bonds, they mourn, and they cheer, all things AI will never do unprompted, because they will never be on the direct path between it and the minimum of any its loss landscape.