What’s it like being a raven or a crow?

What’s it like being a raven or a crow?

From Walter Veit Podcast by Walter Veit

February 2, 2026 · 8 min

About this episode

The episode explores the consciousness and experiences of corvids, particularly ravens and crows, through the lens of scientific research and philosophy.

This recording is based on an article Heather and I published in The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. I’ve copied the text here for convenience: Many of us as children may have wondered what’s going on inside the mind of an animal – what are they thinking and feeling? Most animal researchers study science because of their fascination with animals, but for a long time scientific norms made it impossible to even raise the question of animal consciousness without losing scientific credibility. Fortunately, those days have ended, thanks in large part to pioneering work by scientists such as Donald Griffin , who argued from the 1980s to his death in 2003 that animal minds should be a topic for scientific study. We are philosophers who study consciousness, and in our recent research we worked with other scientists to explore what the world might be like from the point of view of corvids, the family of birds that includes ravens, crows, jays and magpies. “Birdbrain” used to be a common insult but corvids have such surprising intelligence that they are sometimes described by scientists and journalists as “feathered apes” . But we wanted to go…

People in this episode

Host: Walter Veit

Guest: Heather

Topics covered

  • animal consciousness
  • corvids
  • animal behavior
  • philosophy
  • cognition

Keywords

  • corvids
  • raven
  • crow
  • animal intelligence
  • animal consciousness
  • behavior
  • cognition
  • philosophy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Conversation

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