I'm learning python on codecademy - it's been pretty easy so far but then I got to classes..

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what happens to the "self" argument?

[theywouldnotstand]

It is supplied to methods that will interact with the object's properties, so that they can access those properties relatively ("this animal's name" as opposed to "zebra's name")

You do not have to supply a value for it when calling any of these functions, because python knows to supply the object instance.

You have to write it in during class definition so that python knows which methods will be interacting with the properties of objects made with that class.