A useful cheat is to indicate early on that the language of the piece is simply an approximation of the complex language of body movement and smells from the animal world.

Compared to even the nose blunted animal humans have a pitiful sense of smell. It is completely reasonable that since pretty much every other creature on land has a keener olfactory sense that there could and probably is a whole landscape of communication taking place around us.

That's a wordy yes btw :-)

Actually if you want a little twist, humans have something called the Jacobsen Organ or Vomeronasal Organ, it is the receptor portion of the brain that would govern interpreting the massive amount of information conveyed in smell. In humans it is vestigial, you could have a human narrator or annotator in which that organ was active. A 21st century Dr. Doolittle.

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Anyway, it depends of the kind of story it is. If it’s a children’s story you don’t need to explain how they talk to each other kids will take it as a given. Look at the recent movies ‘The Wild’ and ‘Over the Hedge’ all sorts of species speak the same language, and it works because it wasn’t over explained. The author let the viewer make the assumption about how they communicate.

I say this because I can hold a rather complicated conversation with my own horse and understand his responses perfectly. I could do this after about 9 months of working with him. I can generally understand most horses because they use much the same body language. However, I probably would need some time to correctly grasp what a dolphin--even one used to humans--was trying to say because I've never worked with them.

Odin is nomore than a myth to me. Pluse we have tech that can (in developement now) that can kill any thing living, dead, mortal, or not.

Cats are quite odd in their own way. i have never met a cat (unless it had rabies) that did not like me. but i do beleve cats are trying to take over the world before my kind do.

Now Indians had a sign language so they could communicate, which was not the same as speaking. For animals, it might be smell, body postures, expressions, sounds, or a combination of these. It could also be something we cannot hear.

some animals do have common "terms" for things. some animals will hang around with other animals and a warning sound will tell them where the danger comes from, the sky, below, to the sides. Other animals knowing the signal will understand how to react for safety.

You know the difference between cats and dogs?

A dog thinks: "This person is feeding me! He must be a god!"

I have seen aliens based on the animals handled in three basic ways.
One is a person in a animal suit. They are written like normal people but look like animals.
two is an animal made to walk upright. Anne McCafrey's Doona Series did this. The aliens are cats top to bottom, including the purr in the names. Consider an author basing us on how a chimpanzee acts. (Yes I do know a few of those kind of people but that is besides the point).
Both those methods are "cheating" and usually not well done.
The third is where you create the alien from scratch, where they look something like the creature they appear to be. That is hard.