§25

Wittgenstein suggests that it is wrong to say that animals do not talk because they do not think.

Would it be better to say that they do not think because they do not talk?

I was a little unclear about what Wittgenstein was getting at here.

Here are a few thoughts:
1. Wittgenstein wants to claim that words are not imbued with meaning by their mental accompaniments. For one thing, when we say the same thing in the same sort of circumstances on two different occasions two different things might be going on in our minds. But this does not imply that we mean something different on the two different occasions.
2. I'm not sure that it is a mistake to attribute thought to animals - and I'm not sure that's Wittgenstein's position either. What does seem correct to me is to claim that no animal has sentences passing through its mind which it reflects upon. Human beings might have words pass through their minds as they as speaking - but for someone to speak does not mean that they have words passing through their minds. You don't need to formulate what you're going to say in your mind before you say it (although you might).
3. What is necessary for human beings to say something meaningful is for the words they use to have an established use - not that their words have some sort of mental accompaniment.