 Even if these objections to the thinking animal argument can be answered, there is some irony in the fact that the fate of the hallmark argument for animalism should hang in the balance of disputes over the nature of mental properties and the individuation of thinkers. Thought is an essential ingredient not in animalism’s theory of our fundamental nature, but in the theories advanced by animalism’s neo-Lockean rivals. It is precisely our capacity for thought that animalists deny is essential to us; on the contrary, animalists say, each of us was once a non-thinking fetus and each of us may yet become a non-thinking persistent-vegetative-state patient.