My motivation for writing this book was – to put it bluntly – annoyance. What annoyed me so much was the certainty with which people now talk about animal consciousness and what animals feel, using evidence that, in my view, simply did not stand up to scrutiny. This posed a problem. How could I write a book that pointed out the flaws in some of the evidence about animal consciousness without sounding as though I was at the same time making the argument that animals were not conscious at all?  So I have  had to make it clear that questioning is not the same as disagreeing and that pointing out where arguments are weak is an essential part of progress towards any sort of real understanding. 

I have two reasons for assuming this role of awkward questioner. The first is that issues about animal consciousness have immediate practical implications.  What you choose to eat and to wear, your view of whether animals should be kept in zoos or used in scientific experiments, whether and how pests should be controlled and whether some animals deserve better treatment than others – these and many other issues depend on your view of which of them are conscious. 

We all have to decide our attitudes to animals and so we  all need to know not just what the evidence on animal consciousness is, but also how good it is. Think Devil’s Advocate. Think trial by jury.  Questioning exposes weaknesses but it strengthens the case where the evidence survives it.

The second reason is consciousness itself. Consciousness – both in ourselves and in other species – is still profoundly mysterious. We do not understand what makes the lump of nervous tissue that makes up our brains feel anything. We understand what it is made of, how its component nerve cells interact and quite a bit about how it receives and sends messages to the rest of the body. But we do not understand how our brains give rise to subjective experiences such as pain and pleasure. We do not understand why, as the philosopher David Chalmers put it, all the brain’s activity does not go on ‘in the dark’, free of any ‘inner feel’.  I wanted to emphasize how much we still have to learn. Questioning the received wisdom and pointing out problems with widely accepted views seemed an important contribution to make.