Animal awareness

What would it feel like to be another animal?

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Can you imagine what it's like to be a wild animal or your pet. Tricky, right? It's easy to fall into the trap of imagining your own emotions and senses in an animal's body, but the reality would surely be very different. For starters, the mind of an octopus or a pigeon is very different to that of a human. Scientists would like to know how creatures experience the world and, when they talk about it, they use the word "consciousness".

What is consciousness?

The first big problem is that many experts disagree on the exact definition of consciousness, which can make research quite difficult. How can you prove something exists if you're not exactly sure what it is? Consciousness is a word that, broadly, relates to the way humans and animals experience the world.

Some people think being conscious means having experiences that are influenced by your thoughts and feelings what they call subjective experiences.

To understand what this is, it's helpful to imagine

Bees having a ball