Life itself is the image of God – infinite potentiality to reflect God’s infinite actuality. But life is quantitative so not all are made in the image of God equally.
Don’t believe in the rational soul of the Greeks Gnostics and believers in reincarnation and transubstantiation or in anything non-physical inserted into bodies. I believe in the spiritual body described by Paul in 1 Cor 15 which grows from the physical like a tree from a seed, and I believe this is something all living organisms have to various degrees. The divine breath is inspiration and so Genesis 2:7 is about God’s communication with Adam bringing the human mind to life with a memetic inheritance which made us a thousand times more alive than the anything else on the planet, and thus very much more made in the image of God as His children.
That is an inheritance which spread throughout the homo sapiens species very quickly (on the evolutionary scale of things). And there is nothing biological about it so it has nothing to do with biological reproduction but about human communication. The point is that there is nothing genetic about our humanity. After all there is nothing about genetics in the Bible and therefore the use of the Bible for racism and eugenics type thinking is a modern distortion and not the least bit Christian.
But some of this is a failure of language, for it would not be completely accurate to call all the homo sapiens merely animals, any more than we would say that of the babies in the womb. For most things it is the potential for humanity which has our regard and duty for care, generosity, and protection. To be sure without being raised properly our children would little more than beasts, and we see this all to often unfortunately.