Would they become citizens? Would we give them rights and votes? Would they have to pay taxes?
My friend has a dog and a board with big paw size buttons that the dog can push. When the dog pushes a button, the board speaks a word. Thus the dog can speak.
For example, last night the dog came to her and pressed the buttons and said " fix bed". It turns out there was a tortilla chip laying in the middle of the dog’s bed and he wanted it removed.
So there you go dogs can talk. And maybe other animals can talk. They just need a little device to do it. Like a special kind of cell phone maybe.
This is real. It might be the new big thing.
I once read a science fiction story. It was hundreds of years after ww whatever. All the animals were dead except for humans. So we differentiated our species into humans and cattle. The cattle humans were, as you might expect, beastile. There was even a sex scene.
Probably Philip Jose Farmer.