An elephant pauses at a crossroads. Her trunk rises, testing the air. She weighs memory, social awareness, the quality of the wind — then commits to a path. What does she know? And what follows, for science and for ethics, if we take that question seriously? In this talk, Liv Baker shows that animals are knowers — beings with rich, embodied, relational knowledge of their worlds — and that this singular recognition, pursued with rigor and honesty, unsettles much of what we think we know about animal wellbeing, autonomy, and what it even means to study animal lives. Drawing on her research with elephants and a framework she calls Spheres of Wellbeing, Baker makes the case that taking animal inner lives seriously is not simply a methodological adjustment. It is a commitment — to treating animals as subjects rather than objects, in how we ask our que ...