It wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I really started considering the animals we share this planet with, and their perception of the world. It's why a crow is my Mastodon profile pic, why none of my recipes have meat in them, and why I post a frog on the daily.
Ethical debates about animals typically revolve around the question of how intelligent they are compared to us, and whether they have what we call self-awareness, consciousness, a sense of morality and so on.
But ethics aside, there's the very simple fact that animals observe the world differently from us, in a way that we can't fathom. We'll never truly know how a pigeon, a badger or a sheep experiences the world. But we can try.
You could go the extreme route, as naturalist Charles Foster did, and live for a while as a badger or a fox, rummaging around in the forest, eating bugs and earthworms, and generally trying to be as badgering or as foxy as you can.
Or you can do what German writer Leonie Swann did, and write a murder mystery in the Irish countryside, in which a flock of sheep are the sleuths. The result is a book that's funny, thoughtful and, if you're willing to read it that way, philosophical. (It's actually least satisfying as a mystery.)
Most of the book is presented from the perspective of the sheep. We learn that they have a hard time understanding the human perspective, and because we see the world through their eyes, the reader struggles, too. For example, the sheep can't read, so they describe letters by their shape, leaving us to reconstruct what they mean. In this way, the book forces us to take their perspective.
At the same time, their sheepness also affords them benefits: they can eavesdrop on conversations of unsuspecting humans. They can move around the scene of the crime, investigating, without raising any red flags. And they have all the time in the world to ruminate while ruminating.
In the end, the book is a real tour de force, giving us a glimpse into the minds of other beings.
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