they respond to food, loud noises, other physical stimuli, but not to philosophy.

Also, if you open the gates of a farm, cows don't run.

Quoting Dennet

Let us return to our vultures. Consider the hypothesis that for all I could ever know, rotting chicken carcass smells to a turkey vulture exactly the way roast turkey smells to me. Can science shed any light, pro or con, on this hypothesis? Yes, it can almost effortlessly refute it: since how roast turkey tastes to me is composed (and exhausted) by the huge set of reactive dispositions, memory effects, and so on, and so forth, that are detectable in principle in my brain and behavior, and since many of these are utterly beyond the machinery of any vulture's brain, it is flat impossible that anything could smell to a vulture the way roast turkey smells to me.

but let's suppose cows have some sort of free will concept.

if they can't explain it to us, how will we ever understand it? (because it's impossible they have the same free will concept we have)

and if we project our roast turkey smell (free will) concept to cows, how can we be sure that it's what they need or want, if they can't even communicate a yes/no to us?

All our philosophical concepts are based on millennia of history that's been transmitted to future generations that built new concepts on the old ones

They are not "natural"

if you take a child to a remote location and abandon him/her there they wouldn't even know about death or illness, let alone laws or rules or free will. Because nobody thaught them.

We are basically still stuck in a Solaris situation.

but the question still stands, so I propose another one: how do we know that dogs want to live in our homes?

modern neuroscience can explain a lot of things that philosophy still consider questions.