Now that you’re starting to understand how classes and objects work, it’s worth delving a bit more into __init__() and self. They can be confusing!
As mentioned, you can think of __init__() as the method that “boots up” a class’ instance object: the init bit is short for “initialize.”
The first argument __init__() gets is used to refer to the instance object, and by convention, that argument is called self. If you add additional arguments—for instance, a name and age for your animal—setting each of those equal to self.name and self.age in the body of __init__() will make it so that when you create an instance object of your Animal class, you need to give each instance a name and an age, and those will be associated with the particular instance you create.
Check out the examples in the editor. See how __init__() “boots up” each object to expect a name and an age, then uses self.name and self.age to assign those names and ages to each object? Add a third attribute, is_hungry to __init__(), and click Run to see the results.