Guarino, Brian: On the Question of Self-Awareness in a Domestic Cat

This paper asks whether a single domestic cat, observed continuously since kittenhood, shows evidence of self-awareness. Rather than treating self-awareness as a single capacity that is either present or absent, I separate it into four layers: sentience, body self-awareness, theory of mind, and reflective self-recognition. Drawing entirely on naturally occurring behavior rather than staged experiments, I argue for a modest conclusion. The subject does not demonstrate reflective self-recognition,