Do Animals have Souls?

Do animals have souls? Is there a spirit in the body of an animal, or is it simply a complex jumble of cells that interact for a certain period of time?

We observe that there is a difference between a living being and a dead body. We can interact and communicate with a living being. Life grows, takes in some nutrition and produces by-products. Animals move around, and plants are stationary, but both manifest life-symptoms. And when a living being dies...nothing. There is no one home anymore. The body simply decays according to nature's method.

So either the life-force has
(1) ceased to exist, or (2) has gone somewhere else.
If the life-force was a symptom of matter in the first place then what is it, essentially? The life-force appears to be superior, as it was guiding and animating the entire body during life. If your horse is lying down in the stable and at one moment is alive and the next dies, it appears the same body is there before and after the event of death. You're looking at the same horse; same head, same legs, same back, same internal organs, same cells and same molecules. What has changed? The most obvious conclusion is that something that was there is no longer there anymore. At death the life-force departed from that particular body.

According to Vedic wisdom life exists due to the presence of the jiva, or spiritual being or force. A jiva can occupy one of any type of body, and does so temporarily, whether that be for one night like a fire-fly or two thousand years like a sequoia tree. At death the jiva is transferred to another body: animals evolve upwards to higher life-forms. And the body that the being had occupied is shown up in it's true light: simply dead matter. Matter itself has no initiative. A bird flaps around only because of the life-force inside.