What's an animal to do?
 

It seems pretty clear to me that one difference between humans and animals is that humans are aware that they are aware and consequently we can act instead of react.
The thought came to me today related to rebirth and the different worlds of rebirth of which animal is listed, that what's an animal to do.

How could an animal grow or become more aware, less ignorant?
It really can't, what am I missing?

Ok this is what I was missing:

"Animals have always been regarded in Buddhist thought as sentient beings. Furthermore, animals possess Buddha nature (according to the Mahāyāna school) and therefore potential for enlightenment. Moreover, the doctrine of rebirth held that any human could be reborn as animal, and any animal could be reborn as a human. An animal might be a reborn dead relative, and anybody who looked far enough back through their series of lives might come to believe every animal to be a distant relative. The Buddha expounded that sentient beings currently living in the animal realm have been our mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, children, friends in past rebirths. One could not, therefore, make a hard distinction between moral rules applicable to animals and those applicable to humans; ultimately humans and animals were part of a single family. They are all interconnected."

So if animals eat animals to sustain themselves as their food source, (unaware) they could well be a mother and father from a previous incarnation eating each other? (Of course their are no thoughts about what they should and should not eat, because for them its about survival and the continuation of life) Humans on the other hand who choose vegan or vegetarianism, do so for their own personal reasons of course, but it makes me now wonder, (as I do) if this ties into a cycle of human lives, in all this, becoming aware of itself and ending the 'chain of lives' as part of this "food chain" awareness.

If we look at humans and animals as a greater context of rebirth in all this, (ending the chain of lives) then perhaps the choices of what one comes back as negates itself in this view, or maybe you just don't come back in human or animal form? Maybe we come back as rock? :0

That's interesting. Sentient means able to perceive and feel so I would imagine that choice goes with that at some level.

l don't believe this is true.
What can happen is that certain parts of our being incarnate through an animal, bird etc in order to work out certain karmas. Human beings don't reincarnate as animals - that would be a regression.
Animals eventually progress or evolve enough to take a human birth.

Certain parts?

Seriously who is the one deciding all this?

The Soul decides. But, since buddhism [at least the original] never spoke of God or the Soul.

We have many 'parts' to our being - astral, mental and inmost Soul. The astral and mental are evolving and sometimes use animals etc to work out residual karma.
There are also many thought-forms [left behind by the dead who have moved on] floating around that get attached to people and animals - but that's not reincarnation.

But, your putting animals in your own ordered system ( by announcing, this as a regression ) of your own creation, your the one saying soul decides. How do you know this?