Anima(l)

Animal inherently contains anima, which means "soul." Perhaps daemons are animals, rather than a rock or a hot dog or a spirit, that talks with us because we cannot have souls without animals, and we cannot have animals without souls. Maybe that is why an animal is man's best friend, rather than a hammer or a dollar bill or even another human. We can bond with animals because they definitely have souls, as well as personalities, if you have ever spent time around them, but mostly because they don't talk back to us. It is difficult for an animal to hurt our feelings or stab us in the back without the power of speech and two-way communication.

Animals contain the good and the bad in humanity, or what Freud would term the id and the superego. The id is base and desires very basic things as soon as it thinks of them: food, shelter, heat, sex, fruit rollups. This is the part of the animals that just eats everything they see when they see it. The superego is the moral part of us that would say, "You can't eat those fruit rollups because they belong to somebody else. If you really want fruit rollups, go buy some!" And while the argument can be made that animals are inherently the absence of morals, I believe that they have a lot more morals than we do. They're a lot nicer to each other for one, and they don't wage war on the others for being a different color. And like I already mentioned, they don't backstab and lie and break promises and put other animals in cages. We do that.