Despite increasing numbers of publications showing that many animals possess the neural substrates involved in emotions and consciousness, many animals are still restrained and forced to take part in applied or fundamental research. However, these restraints stress animals and may result in false negatives or false positives. A change is needed in researchers’ work paradigm with animals to progress in behavioral and neuroscience research and thus gain access to hitherto inaccessible yet important scientific results. Animals interact with the world in their own ways, and researchers need to adopt these ways, i.e. their agency, to perform better research and develop a better understanding of how the brain and behavior evolve. This paper discusses how animal agency can not only be the key to more wide-ranging and improved research in existing domains, but can also lead to new research questions resulting from a non-anthropocentric view.