Animal Awareness

In class we have been talking a lot about what it means for an animal to be conscious. A point that comes up again and again is whether or not an animal is self-conscious. I find it hard to believe that an animal has no concept of itself whatsoever, that all animal behavior that suggest as such is simply an evolutionary development that helps the animal survive. Something that came to my mind in support of animals being self conscious on some level was from the video that we watched in class. There was a scene in which the chimps were shown interacting with each other like a family, raising their young, socializing, ect. It seems to me that if an animal is able to have such complex social relationships that they would first need to have some notion of the self. It would make sense on a fundamental level that animals would need to realize that they themselves exist before extending their focal point to include other beings. Perhaps animals with less complex or hierarchical social relationships, such as deer, have a lessened degree of self awareness because they have no need to develop a sense of "I" within a group.

My question for this blog is do you think that animals who are highly involved in raising their young have to be conscious on some level of other animals and therefore the self or is everything just instinct as a result of evolution?