'What pleases the lion', he insists, 'is not the sight of "a stag or a wild goat", but that he is going to get a meal.'¹ The lion's pleasure, Aristotle thinks, is a pleasure of anticipation, and so he must take it to involve apprehending the prospect of having a meal. This makes clear that he thinks non-human animals can, in some way or other, anticipate or envisage prospects.
— Hendrik Lorenz
Aristotle is pressing against something we tend to flatten. We assume the animal acts on raw appetite — sensation, stimulus, reflex — and leave it there. But he will not leave it there. The lion does not respond to the sight of prey as a mechanism responds to a trigger. It apprehends something that has not happened yet: the meal, the having of the meal, the satisfaction that lies ahead. That apprehension is already a kind of imagination, a reaching toward a not-yet that is genuinely present to the animal's inner life as anticipation. Pleasure, on this reading, is cognitive before it is somatic.
This matters because it closes the distance we have spent centuries manufacturing between human and animal interiority. The soul that can anticipate can also be disappointed — can hold an image of what it will obtain and suffer when that image collapses against reality. Desire shaped by anticipated futures is desire that can fail in specifically imaginative ways, not merely in ways a body fails. Aristotle is not sentimentalizing the lion. He is being precise about what appetite requires structurally: a mind that can project, which means a mind that can mourn a projection, which means the lion's wanting already contains something more than hunger.
Hendrik Lorenz·The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle·2006