Even microbes are able to alter their behavior in response to threats or opportunities in their environment. But just where do you draw the line between "animal" and "man", a herd of beasts and a civilization of sentient humans.

The answer is, of course, subjective. Human beings have too often considered whole categories of their own species as property, not just as spoils of war, prisoners, or economic chattel the way the Romans and Greeks treated their slaves, but as subhuman beasts of burden the way Europeans treated Africans, or the Nazis treated everyone else.

We have no way of knowing how alien races will respond to this, or if or how they will manage any cross-species ethics they may or may not have. The big hazy divide between people and creature may be marked by a purely arbitrary boundary, one fixed by simple convenience or even economic expedience.

I recall in one science fiction story where the aliens considered only civilizations who had developed interstellar travel as real people. These aliens were interstellar merchants who traveled from star to star on lightsail ships propelled by induced novas in the suns they stopped at to trade. They were willing to allow "primitives" to develop in peace, as long as they (their customers)were willing to build the giant laser cannon needed to propel them (the merchants) to the next world in their itinerary. But if the inhabitants of a system were unwilling or unable to do this, they and their world would be vaporized in the artificial nova event required to boost our aliens to their next business opportunity. Our merchant aliens carried a device aboard their ship that could initiate core instability and detonation in any star.

After all. If you can't build a starsail-propelling laser, even after you are sold the plans, then you are obviously not real people. You're just an animal.