Kay, here we go. (Also, fuck you phone. That's sapience. )When I get home, I will share my full opinion then. I actually don't entirely disagree with you, but I think we define salience differently.
Something I think everyone should understand (because language porn) before I continue is where the inherent point of reference comes from. Our species identifier is "homo sapiens." Homo means "man, human" in Latin when not used as a prefix, (ex: "homosexual" does not mean "mansex", it means "same sex", because ancient dead language rules.) and "sapiens" is derived from the word "sapient." Our own species identifier, translated from its mother tongue, roughly means "(hu)man be wise."
How we understand sapience isn't necessarily how intelligent something actually is, it's how human-like that intelligence is. For example: Young Chimps outperform most Adult Humans in numeracy memorization tests. That is, they actually have sharper memories for basic math than we do in general. Here is a blatant example of an animal outperforming a human in a feat of intelligence.
A perfect example of exploring and explaining this concept in writing is in Starship Troopers (the novel, not the movie--though the movie is pretty great for entirely different reasons). "The Bugs" in Starship Troopers are actually brilliant enough to achieve spaceflight, launch WMD-level weapons at humanity, and present a genuine threat to mankind's existence on a repeated basis. They demonstrate cunning and the ability to fight with a variety of tactics, up to and even including guerrilla warfare and poisoning the well. Yet, our ability to understand, empathize with, and interact with this species starts and ends at species warfare: They're so far removed from a human-like existence, that we're forced to compare them to what we know. They may very well exceed our intelligence, but how they go about in their existence is so far removed from our ability to understand, that they fail every test of sapience you could throw at them. Because their intelligence is not human-like in any way, shape, or form.
When we test for sapience, we test for intelligence similar to our own. Crows have long term memories that can pass through generations, but they don't have our opposable thumbs. Chimps have incredible mental acuity concerning certain mathematical tasks, but they're never going to match our societal sophistication. Ants can coordinate themselves with near-perfect accuracy and timing in numbers ranging in the tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands or millions outright in Amazonian rainforests--a feat that mankind can only envy from afar--but they'll never have our sheer strength.
What is ultimately unique to humanity is how far our logos goes. How far beyond ourselves we can perceive, imagine, conceptualize, and try to conquer--it's unique to us. We're one of the only species on Earth that both adjusts the environment to suit its needs, and adjusts to the environment to survive.
The question of sapience isn't a black or white "is it or isn't it intelligent/self-aware?" It's "how far on the sliding scale of human-like is it?" That's why no animal on Earth will ever test to our level or beyond it. Because we set the benchmark upon ourselves--which is fairly reasonable, given that we're only certain of our own capabilities.
tl;dr: Is anything sapient like a human, aside from a human? No. Are animals sapient? Yes. To what degree they are, is up for debate, because most of our tests are imperfect and designed with a human-like intelligence in mind.