 First, if philosophy often begins with questions about the place of humans in nature, one way humans have attempted to locate themselves is by comparison and contrast with those things in nature most similar to themselves, i.e., other animals.  At least in the West, the traditional — and perhaps still intuitive to many people — way of thinking about consciousness is as primarily an innate endowment of humans, which other animals may or may not share in virtue of being sufficiently like us. Within the traditional Biblical cosmology, while all animals were said to have arisen through divine intentional creation, humans were the only ones created in the likeness of the deity, and thus enjoyed a special, privileged role in the intended workings of the cosmos — including, for example, access to an eternal afterlife not overpopulated with fleas, ants and snails. (See Lewis, 2009 Ch 9 for an in-depth treatment of the problem of animal consciousness in relation to Christian theology.) However, within a modern biological worldview, while humans may be unique in certain (perhaps quite important) respects, we are only one species of animal among many — one tip of one branch of the phylogenetic tree of life, and enjoy no particular special status. 