Do animals have 'beliefs'?

It is with this end of unifying the sciences of the mind with social life that the pragmatists began their attempts to define ‘belief’.  Adopting a developmental perspective, Bain observed that mammals are born in action: sucking, swallowing, rooting, and so on.  But belief does not guide these initial actions until some interruption or obstacle prevents instinctive behavior from serving an animal’s need for nourishment, security, and affection.  Because of inevitable environmental irregularities, an animal must draw on sensorimotor memories and expectations to gain control over its initial attempts to move and feed.  As these memories and expectations are representations of its past and future actions and observations, they do ‘reference’ a time beyond that at which they occur.  Memories and expectations are therefore an animal’s most basic beliefs.  Human minds are indeed variations on this theme.
 
[Referencing Alexander Bain, Mental and Moral Science, Part 1: Psychology and History of Philosophy.  Longmans & Green, 1872 and his Mind and Body, 2nd ed. Henry S. King and Co., 1872.]
From : Belief: A Pragmatic Picture: A Precis by Aaron Zimmerman,  William James Studies, v. 16, no. 1, Fall 2020, pg.  37