You seem to need a language to write a narrative. Animals communicate and they may feel, think, and plan, but not with the same level of organization as people do. Animals are somewhere between machines and people.

How do they get by in nature? Their fears are limited because it takes a big brain and an overactive imagination to generate existential terror based on deep realization of how alienated living things should be from nature's monstrousness. So animals are spared the existential condition of having to discover an unnatural way of coping because they're not as free from the instinctive, genetically determined life cycle.