'Metaphor' is generally held to be an association of formal similarity, say, similarity of image or form, shape. It can also be a 'similitude of reason'. How do dogs 'think'? As hunters, their spatial awareness is objective oriented, which they pursue in a direct line. Our dogs are wolfhounds. On one occasion, one of them came in the room, spotted a new calendar with a picture of a wolf on a mountain ridge, froze and stared (he had never seen a wolf). The meaning for him of the image was one of similarity with something in his neural network. He paused and evaluated. Then he lost interest. Do dogs operate on the basis of visual similarity? Yes. When they pause to evaluate that similarity, are they 'thinking'? Depends. If you accept metaphor as a prerational judgement, it would seem to be certain.

Thanks Richard Patterson I was thinking of metaphoric thinking as pre rational and also thinking how it could help with animals that function collectively without language.

Hi! Take a look at this:

Abstract concepts in the primate brain

Do primates have neurons that encode the conceptual similarity between spaces that differ by their appearance but correspond to the same mental schema? Baraduc et al. recorded from monkey hippocampal neurons while the animals explored both a familiar environment and a novel virtual environment that shared the same general structure as the familiar environment but displayed never-before-seen landmarks. About one-third of hippocampal cells showed significantly correlated firing for both familiar and novel landscapes. These correlations hinged on space or task elements, rather than on immediate visual information. The functional features of these cells are analogous to human concept cells, which represent the meaning of a specific stimulus rather than its apparent visual properties.

Science, this issue p. 635Article Schema cells in the macaque hippocampus