In the Politics, bk. 1, pt. 2, Aristotle concludes that "man is more of a political [i.e., social] animal" than other social, animals, like bees, and the only being capable of creating a government. Hobbes concludes that social animals, again using bees as an example, don't need a government.
In part, these conclusions are built on their observation that animals don't have the ability to communicate anything other than to express pleasure or pain: they don't have words or speech. Aristotle, supra ("Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust."); Hobbes, ch. 17, at 83 ("though they have some use of voice, in making know to one another their desires and other affects; yet they want that art of words, by which some men can represent to others that which is good in the likeness or evil"). Of course, this observation is false, as we know today that bees communicate with each other. They just don't do it through speech; they do it through pheromones.
They both also observe that other social animals, though they are social, lack a moral sense of right and wrong. Artistotle, supra ("it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like"); Hobbes, ch. 17, at 83 (calling social animals other than humans "irrational creatures [that] cannot distinguish between injury and damage"). Oliver Wendell Holmes disagrees. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law, 3 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co 1881) ("[E]ven a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.").
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