I can assure you that dogs and other "lower" animals have experienced existential crisis--although they did not come up with language to describe the experience.  Look at the psychological experiments done on learned helplessness in dogs. Compare those results to learned helplessness demonstrated in humanity in the form of substance abuse as well as depression and anxiety and other "abnormal" psychological patterns, and tell me they are not the same conscious experience, with the same demonstrated results…,(reply>), The assertion that animals of lower form, do not possess the same conscious experience, it’s pretty biased, and egocentric.  If you can’t even measure consciousness, how can you say that one animal possesses more consciousness and then another.