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Record so far: animals have been to the Moon's vicinity but none has touched it. Zond 5 (September 1968) carried two steppe tortoises, with flies and plants, around the Moon and back to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, the first Earth creatures to circle it, ten weeks before Apollo 8. Dogs did the orbital groundwork before that (Laika on Sputnik 2 in November 1957, who died in orbit; Belka and Strelka in August 1960, the first animals recovered alive from orbit), and the animal flights stopped the moment people could fly instead, because an animal in a capsule answers a question that only needs answering once. For a non-human to walk on the Moon by 2040 someone has to land it on purpose: either a crewed lander (Artemis III is NASA's first, no earlier than 2027 on the current schedule and slipping) with mass to spare and a pressurised way for the animal to move outside, or a long-stay base where a dog or a cat is company rather than payload. The second is the only realistic path, and base timelines sit in the mid-2030s at the earliest, so 41% is really a bet on a lunar base with spare mass existing by 2040. Dogs remain the species we send first to find things out: they flew before people, and they are now in the first lifespan trials of anti-aging drugs (mine): https://w0lph.github.io/k9/why-dogs.html?v=2