From an evolutionary perspective, consciousness is a trait that some animals have (at least humans have it). Salient questions include: Is it a late evolved, narrowly distributed trait, or an older more broadly shared trait? And, did it evolve only once, or a number of times independently? From this view point, the question “Are (non-human) animals conscious?” is rather strange, because, for example, it implicitly groups bats together with rabbits (as ‘nonhuman’ animals) in contrast to humans. In reality, rabbits are more closely related to humans than they are to bats (Nishihara et al. 2006), so framing the question this way embeds a false presupposition. Of course, it is consistent with an evolutionary perspective that humans are the only conscious animals. This would imply that consciousness was acquired through a recent evolutionary event that occurred since the split of our ancestral lineage from that of our closest non-human relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos (see section 6 for discussion of such hypotheses). But such a view requires support; though perhaps intuitive to some, its choice as a default position is arbitrary.