There are a lot of issues with this sort of claim. One that is most often missed is that you don't expect more than one very smart species with tool capabilities to evolve if one expects them to act at all like humans do. Humans have spread out to the entire planet in a short time from an evolutionary standpoint, and we've drastically and rapidly altered pretty much every ecosystem on the planet, in many cases putting major selective pressures on other species against them moving into at all similar niches. And when there is a smart, tool using species, one of the things we do is enslave it for our ends while hunting the wild ones (elephants are one of the good examples).

In this context, this argument isn't maybe that relevant since the authors are trying to look at the last 100 million years and are looking at the encephalization quotient across all species, so this sort of concern matters less for their version of the analysis, and the rest of the idea seems interesting. If so, then some major part of the Great Filter may be simply getting intelligent enough to start a civilization.