You don't need talk to animals to trigger the cutscene with the owlbear mum. Just go close enough and then it triggers. You need a decent number in animal handling to succeed in convincing mum to not attack you though.
If the cutscene doesn't trigger, it's most likely a bug. I had something similar, where the wrong npc always appeared at the windmill in the Blighted Village (Spike, the torturer, instead of that ranger goblin). For me it was fixed with patch 4.
