Dyson,
LOL - I had to read your last post a couple of times before I realised that you had quoted first me and then Venom - until then, it made no sense at all! I have wondered how to do a multi-quote on this site, it has never worked for me (using FireFox). Obviously I could hack it together 'by hand' in an editor.
I still find it hard to imagine thinking without words - I imagine the dog in your example thinking "Oh great - food!". It is particularly hard to imagine planning - such as a squirrel planning how to get to up to an inaccessible bird feeder - without 'words'. However, who is to say that intelligent animals don't have an internal set of mental 'words', they just don't share them with others.
David |