Do animals have free Will?

[The Grand Nudger]

No they won't. How could they act with reference to their thoughts and actions if they are not aware of them?

Wouldn't that be more an instinct than a thought (if they were having some activity in their heads they were unaware of)?

That depends. I'm not certain if the wolf makes its decisions after considering its own motivations and thoughts or if the behavior is innate or ingrained. If its the former, then the wolf is more competent, if latter, I am.

Many predators success rates are very much dependent on their ability to determine when it is time to chase and when it is not, or when to ignore their hunger (in some cases literally starving) to avoid blowing an ambush, or to single out a better target. This again seems to be an issue of creating criteria that favor human beings and then declaring us the winner. We have absolutely no idea how "rich" the inner lives of animals is, (because of barriers to communication), but anytime their actions would seem to imply something that we would recognize as thought it is immediately dismissed as innate, or ingrained. Well, I'm going to start dismissing all human thought or the effects or actions taken as a consequence of those thoughts as innate, and ingrained.

By not acting according to biological impulses or learned behavior.

The wolf above then, not acting on it's impulses (when it is starving and yet forgoes the chase)? Problem solving cephalopods that open jars or escape their containment despite being in a completely alien environment interacting with completely alien objects? Don't biological impulses and learned behaviors cover a pretty wide range of the human experience as well?

If that was true, then we'd never gain any new knowledge. Our knowledge is not given to us by our biological make-up and all conditioning is repetition according to per-existing knowledge. For new knowledge to develop, there needs to be capacity for thought independent of either.

Our biology allows for curiosity, reason, and memory, our conditioning compels us to leverage them (except when it doesn't). How exactly, would this not allow for new information to be developed? I'm perfectly willing to concede that we are superior to other animals in this regard. That's the niche we've devolped to fill. Do we have a capacity for thought that is independent of our biology? How have you determined this?

If a qualifier is "self awareness" then maybe we should take a dispassionate view of self awareness and propose that it may not express itself in other species in the same way that it expresses itself in us (anthropic bias). For example, is some level of "self awareness" required for social interaction and communication? I would say so. Again, if we're talking about levels of this or that, then we're talking about levels of "free will."

"Yes, animals have free will(insert whatever you like here in place of free will with regards to mental capacity), but not as much free will as us, based upon metrics that are favorable to us".
or
"No, animals do not have free will(again, substitute whatever you like), based on metrics that are favorable to us".

As I've said, it may be that these are valid metrics, that doesn't mean that we should ignore the strong possibility that we're playing fast and loose with the rules of the game we've created.