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It’s not circular reasoning; it’s inductive reasoning based on empirical observation.
We didn’t just sit in a room and arbitrarily decide 'only animals get to be conscious.' Instead, science looked at how consciousness actually behaves. We know from centuries of medical and neurobiological data that if you damage, anesthetise, or remove centralised neural networks, consciousness vanishes, even while the rest of the body's cells remain alive and chemically responding to stimuli.
Furthermore, this baseline doesn't just limit consciousness to mammals like us. Science actively recognizes consciousness in octopuses, which are invertebrates with a radically different, alien brain structure.
you can't prove that something isn't conscious, so you can't know that there aren't conscious rocks or gas clouds or whatever. but by defining consciousness in a way that precludes anything except animals, we have precluded ever discovering consciousness in non-animals, and therefore precluded other ways of being conscious from study.