Can animals be persons? Scientific and philosophical consensus supplies a resounding, 'No!' In this book, Mark Rowlands disagrees. Not only can animals be persons, many of them probably are. A person is an individual in which consciousness, rationality, self-awareness and other-awareness converge, and many animals are such individuals. Rowlands proposes a novel approach to a timely question about the nature of persons and the metaphysical status of nonhuman animals. For anyone interested in the current international legal debates about animal personhood, scientific debates about metacognition and social cognition, and philosophical debates about rationality and consciousness, this book is essential reading. Rowlands grounds these debates by synthesizing philosophical work on the nature of mind and persons with cutting edge research in the science of animal cognition in a way that is accessible to experts and nonexperts alike.