 Of course, the basis for the common-sense intuition that animals possess phenomenally conscious states can even be challenged. (How, after all, are we supposed to know whether it is like something to be a bat?) And that intuition can perhaps be explained away as a mere by-product of imaginative identification with the animal. (Since our images of their experiences are phenomenally conscious, we may naturally assume that the experiences imaged are similarly conscious (Carruthers 1999, 2000). But there is no doubt that one major source of resistance to higher-order theories will lie here, for many people, especially given various moral considerations about animal pain and suffering. (For one set of attempts to defuse this resistance, arguing that a higher-order account need have few if any implications for our moral practices or for comparative psychology, see Carruthers 2005, chapter nine; 2019, chapter eight.)  Of course, some will point out that there are also enough neurophysiological similarities between (at least some parts of) human and animal brains to justify attributions of, say, pains, desires, and basic perceptual states. It is worth emphasizing here that HOT theory does not say that having conscious states requires having introspective states, that is, having conscious HOTs. Conflating introspection with having mere unconscious HOTs (and therefore simply having first-order conscious states) may lead some to put forth a misguided straw man argument against HOT theory.