Under the predictive coding model (and I'm sure some others), animal intelligence is also compression. The idea is that the early layers of the brain minimize how surprising incoming sensory signals are, so the later layers only have to work with truly entropic signal. But it has non-compression-based intelligence within those more abstract layers.
I doubt there's any consensus on one model, but it's certainly true that many neuroscientists are using the predictive coding at least some of the time
