Animals: First Person View

[Xtafa]

I have an animal, low intelligence, which has a short chapter in my current story. I am writing from their perception their journey for a day. 

The struggle I'm having is how to interpret it without seeming too intelligent or human.

[Example: a spark of electricity, it doesn't know what electricity is but knows WHAT it is and that it can be hurt by it, it thinks of it as a flash of light.. but would it understand that very thought?] 

Thinking I may need to increase its intelligence to handle my lack of writing skill. 

 

Has anyone written something similar or could recommend a story to read that contains this?

[Mestiv]

I haven't written anything like that, but you might find useful, that for example cats intelligence is comparable to ~2 years old child. They comprehend that gravity is a thing, things fall down. They know that is they feel that something's hot, you'd better not touch it.

Also, remember that most animals depend on their smell much more than us. Their noses are far superior to ours, so it'd be nice to include that for example a dog can smell things that are inside the fridge.

Animals also have very different social  rules, so if your animal is to interact with other animals, you'll need some reasearch. Dogs are surprisingly good at reading human body language (thousands of years of evolution in that direction), but cats are not.

[Kureshi Ironclaw]

I would lean towards focusing on what the animal is noticing and how they react to it. To make it not sound too human, I think sticking to short sentence structures and concrete words is your best bet.

The bit that is tripping it up a bit in my head is that it is in first person.  In past tense especially it kind of implies that the animal is recounting the story, but animals don't tell stories in prose. Third person might help you out a lot more to write from an animal perspective and make it feel animal.

[Zelly]

Agree with short sentence structures....like 1-2 words max, low vocab, high repetition.

Dog meeting a new dog: "Dog! Friend? Maybe friend? Friends nice. Kinda scary though. [body language, wagging, showing belly, etc?] Happy! Friend friend friend. Smells like poop! Poop is good."

Now I'm just imagining baby spren when they're kind of idiots.

[Koloss]

Like the Dog from Divinity game perhaps?