In other channeled material, it has been said there are actually three distinct species of sentient beings capable of advanced abstract thought—humans, dolphins, and whales. Is this true?

This is true if you judge by human standards. There are many exquisite kinds of intelligence among the flora and fauna, but they are of a different kind and quality in many instances than humans experience, so you have an innate bias that your way of thinking and perceiving is superior. We would see it as quite limited other than your ability to imagine possibilities in a creative sense—that is indeed a higher faculty and one that you share more greatly with the divine than other species. But it is correct that the dolphins and the whales are the closest to human in terms of intellectual firepower, so to speak. They have a complex interaction not only through the sounds they make, which is a kind of language, but primarily through intuitive communication, and that is on a par with human non-local consciousness in being able to perceive things and arrive at knowings that are complete and understandable in a very deep sense and not based on language at all but more on a pictorial representation of energy. That has been sensed by humans intuitively to be the case and the main reason humans perceive these species in particular, in addition to their behaviors, as being quite special.