Pretty much. Most animals are both smarter than you expect, but also tend to be more limited in what they can reason about.

It's why anyone who's ever taken care of a needy pet will inevitably reach the comparison that taking care of a pet is similar to taking care of a very young child; it's needy, it experiences emotions but it can't quite figure out on its own how to adapt to an environment besides what it grew up around/it's own instincts. They experience some sort of qualia (a lot of animals are pretty family-minded), but good luck teaching a monkey to read. The closest we've gotten is teaching them that if they press the right button, they get food, but they take basically their entire lifespan to understand a couple hundred words, while humans easily surpass that.

IIRC some of the smartest animals in the world are actually rats. They experience a qualia very close to humans to the point that psychology experiments are often easily observable in rats.