I get your point but I don't think that those quotes establish familiarity with meat based animals. Familiarity with animals would be something like "yeah, sure, we know about that planet with cows but this is something else entirely!" (Also humans wouldn't be so surprising if they knew about things like cows).

Their references are not to creatures that are meat through-and-through but fictional alien races that have a kind of incidental relationship to meat that doesn't establish meat-based cognition as normal the way that animals would.