Ryan Huling is a writer and explorer focusing on animals, food and technology. He is a senior writer at the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific and the author of “The Hidden Nations of Animals.”
When ecologists relocated dozens of bighorn sheep from Oregon, eastern Wyoming and other locations to the Rocky Mountains to restore populations eradicated by hunters, the animals — typically seasonal migrants — had no idea what to do. A handful decided to follow local bighorns around to learn how they navigated this vast and unfamiliar terrain. The rest didn’t even attempt to migrate.
The local herds traveled along time-tested pathways they had learned from their ancestors — reliable routes that had been shrewdly forged between high-risk predation areas and short plant-growth seasons. This centuries-old migratory practice, researchers determined, is driven not by instinct but shared through cultural transmissions from parent to child or peer to peer. If a herd’s traditional pathways are disrupted, such as by human interference, it expunges “generations of knowledge.”
Similar community-based behaviors exist in many nonhuman societies. Sperm whales communicate using group-specific dialects older than Sanskrit. Certain chimpanzee communities share knowledge of how to use stone tools to crack open palm oil nuts. Matriarchal forest elephants pass down wisdom about extensive pathway networks through the Congo Basin undergrowth, where new generations learn about established transit corridors by following their elders. White-browed sparrow weavers build nests according to the distinctive style of their cultural group, each of which has its own architectural traditions.
And yet, such behaviors — which are often crucial to animals’ survival — are not acknowledged by global institutions dedicated to protecting cultural activities. They are conspicuously absent from the list of roughly 800 “intangible” cultural heritage practices and expressions recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Inclusion on that list could open the door to special protections and funding for preservation.
To be eligible for UNESCO nomination, cultural activities must be actively practiced today and fit within one of five key domains: “oral traditions and expressions,” “traditional craftsmanship,” “performing arts,” “knowledge and practices on nature and the universe” or “social practices, rituals, and festive events.”
The list runs the gamut from submissions of near-universal renown — Kabuki theater, reggae music — to the borderline self-parodic, such as Bosnian grass-mowing competitions. Also on the list: distinct Turkish whistling languages and Alpine yodeling dialects used to unite isolated agrarian communities across vast mountain valleys.
Some intangible practices on the list involve millions of participants, such as the sacred Kumbh Mela festival, where oral traditions and knowledge are shared every few years in cities along the Ganges River. Others, like Iran’s fabled Bakhshi music traditions, have only a handful of remaining practitioners. The limiting factor for inclusion isn’t scale. It’s species.
This is, regrettably, reflective of humanity’s enduring sense of superiority. But by failing to recognize animal culture, we risk destabilizing or losing the sophisticated nonhuman societies that created the world we think of as our own.
Generations Of Knowledge
To the extent that animals are represented on the UNESCO list, it is exclusively in the service of human enrichment. Mystical animal sacrifices got a green light. So did Slovenian beekeeping, Middle Eastern falconry and Omani camel racing. In 2020, bullfighting was very nearly added to the list at Spain’s request, until People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other animal advocates successfully campaigned against it. But seasonal droving of sheep is venerated, as are specialized techniques of reindeer herding.
What’s missing from the list is any recognition that if those sheep and reindeer were not relegated to subservient roles, they would likely be engaging in ancient cultural exchanges of their own — as their species have since long before Homo sapiens emerged. Biologists have shown, for instance, that if reindeer (also known as caribou) discover that their traditional feeding area has been rendered inaccessible by freezing rain, they will draw on a pool of shared memories to identify alternative spots where they have succeeded in overcoming such challenges in the past.
In some cases, nonhuman communities even demonstrate cultural practices that have clear parallels to our own — which shouldn’t be surprising, given that some anthropologists argue early humans were inspired to engage in everything from cave painting to infrastructural engineering by observing what bears, beavers and other animals were up to.
Rainmaking songs and dances practiced by humans in Japan and Botswana have been selected for UNESCO protection; the latter has been flagged as “in need of urgent safeguarding.” But as the late Jane Goodall and her colleagues documented, chimpanzee populations in Gombe, Mahale and other sub-Saharan regions also perform dramatic “rain dances,” which can involve charging, calling, slapping and dragging branches — part of a broader pattern of culturally variable display behaviors across chimp communities.
“By failing to recognize animal culture, we risk destabilizing or losing the sophisticated nonhuman societies that created the world we think of as our own.”
Similarly, entire books have been dedicated to the methods through which some animals grieve the loss of companions and mates in socially influenced — and sometimes group-specific — behaviors that echo the rituals human societies use to venerate their dead. Asian elephants in India’s Bengal region, for instance, have been documented loudly mourning and burying their dead calves in a manner reminiscent of human funeral rites.
But such practices have too often been dismissed as fundamentally different in kind from human culture. As the thinking goes, “Humans make and do things because only we have culture, and when those things we make and do change over time, we call it history,” writes zooarchaeologist Sarah Newman of the University of Chicago. “When animals make and do things, we call it instinct, not culture. When the things they make and do change over time, we call it evolution, not history.”
As technology deepens humanity’s knowledge of other animal societies, a growing scientific cohort finds that distinction increasingly untenable. In a peer-reviewed treatise for Nature Sustainability last October, biologists, philosophers and evolutionary anthropologists from the University of Bristol, the University of Zurich and the London School of Economics and Political Science asserted that “animal cultures have intrinsic, irreplaceable value, and yet they are not adequately protected by preserving habitat. The time has come for UNESCO to explicitly protect non-human cultural heritage alongside human heritage.”
They rooted their argument in three main points. First, they made the case that animals have demonstrated distinct cultures. By any conventional definition, animals possess socially learned behaviors, norms, traditions and knowledge that may be passed down through generations and are distinct from those of other groups. Second, they argued that animal cultures help other species survive, benefiting biodiversity, and provide value for humans by expanding our understanding of “the complexity and sophistication of the social lives of animals.” Third, they asserted that existing UNESCO protections for habitat areas, such as nature preserves, are woefully insufficient, because when societies move, their cultures travel with them.
To rectify this omission, the authors propose an elegant solution: Add a new item to UNESCO’s submissions criteria to allow for “an outstanding example of animal culture, demonstrating behavioural patterns and social learning that are integral in the traditions and ecosystems of an animal species, population or group.”
Their amendment seeks not to expand the fundamental definition of culture, as humans currently understand it — but to fulfill it as written. Yet this strikes at the heart of humanity’s long-held conception of its own intellectual supremacy. It decenters Homo sapiens as the genesis of all culture on Earth in a way that has historically ruffled feathers — even as many leading thinkers now agree that such a correction is long overdue.
The Atlas Of Animalkind
One hundred years ago, naturalist Henry Beston leased a small plot of sand on Cape Cod and built a tiny cottage where he could focus on his writing. But as Beston quickly realized, the beach surrounding his fortress of solitude was anything but vacant. In fact, it was densely inhabited by seabirds, foxes, deer and other individuals, whose daily routines he found to be more orderly and sensible than those of his fellow humans.
Writing in his seminal work, “The Outermost House,” Beston presciently intuited that, far from being background players in Earth’s vast cultural landscape, other animals are “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are neither brethren nor underlings, he wrote — “they are other nations.”
Today, Beston’s expansive view of animalkind is more visible to us than ever before. As I document in my nonfiction travelogue, “The Hidden Nations of Animals,” high-resolution satellite imagery, machine-learning systems and advanced GPS technologies are rapidly decoding ancient animal societies with unprecedented detail, illuminating a world brimming with cultural abundance.
In northwest India, for instance, animal behavior expert Hemal Naik and his colleagues from Project MELA — an acronym inspired by the Sanskrit word mela, meaning a gathering where culture, tradition and connection converge — have spent years documenting the lives of native antelopes known as blackbucks. Renowned for their long, spiraled horns, blackbucks have inspired Indian folklore, paintings and literature for at least 2,000 years. Some populations also engage in elaborate courtship displays as part of a rare mating system called lekking — a practice observed primarily among birds.
“Asian elephants in India’s Bengal region have been documented loudly mourning and burying their dead calves in a manner reminiscent of human funeral rites.”
In a scene strikingly reminiscent of the UNESCO-endorsed festivals held by disparate nomadic peoples for courtship, weddings, dancing and old-school social networking, hundreds of male blackbucks gather in clustered territories, raise their chins skyward and employ fancy footwork to impress female onlookers. Naik theorizes that such practices may be essential to the long-term survival of these populations, because the gathering of males from across a vast region enables females to efficiently evaluate the fitness of many potential suitors. If their time-honored practice were somehow disrupted, the antelopes could have far fewer mating choices, potentially triggering a downward spiral.
The blackbucks’ traditional gatherings unfold over a handful of weeks each year within highly specific areas known as lekking arenas. Within these arenas, males form large circular territories with distinct scent markings, then carve shallow depressions in the soil with their horns where females can rest — an ecosystem-engineering tableau visible in satellite imagery.
By unobtrusively flying a fleet of drones at altitudes beyond the animals’ perception, the Project MELA team filmed more than 150 hours of footage — the single largest collection of drone recordings ever compiled of a nonhuman behavior. This footage was then analyzed using a custom-built AI system capable of tracking individual interactions with unprecedented precision, revealing which males prevailed in head-to-head competitions and which courtship strategies proved most successful. With more than 1 million annotations, their dataset effectively deciphers the precise practices that sustain this ancient ritual, and lays the groundwork for its preservation.
“We now understand that humans are not the creators of all — or perhaps even most — cultures that keep our world in balance,” Naik told me. “To see the full picture, we have to zoom our lens much farther out.”
The Least We Could Do
Despite the growing body of evidence that animal cultures have played an important role in inspiring the human heritages we cherish today, UNESCO is not currently considering adding any new criteria to the World Heritage Convention. François Wibaux, a press officer with the organization, cautioned that such a step “would be a significant and lengthy process, requiring review through the Convention’s statutory procedures.”
In December 2025, the World Heritage team at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) launched a five-year initiative to explore how knowledge of animal cultures can support biodiversity conservation, Wibaux noted. But the IUCN is not part of the U.N., and its work is already explicitly focused on wildlife conservation, so this initiative does not represent a significant widening of humanity’s lens.
For behavioral ecologist Danai Papageorgiou, who co-authored the Nature Sustainability piece calling for a UNESCO animal-culture amendment, the scientific basis for her argument gets stronger by the day as we gradually discover what the rest of the animal kingdom is up to. Fossil evidence suggests that specific chimpanzee populations have been using stone tools for more than 4,300 years, but documentation of this practice was not published until the 1960s. Better late than never.
While we can disagree about the outer frontiers of cultural knowledge, modern science has long since moved past the Cartesian dichotomy that once divided rational human minds from the alleged automatons of the animal kingdom.
Now, Papageorgiou says, it’s time for other global institutions to get with the program. Conservationists who measure the ebb and flow of topline animal population numbers can now judge their success by an additional metric: the preservation of animalkind’s cultural vibrancy. To facilitate this, research teams have begun developing frameworks to help organizations recognize cultural traditions as a measurable “unit to conserve.” Such systems take often-murky processes of social learning and cultural transmission and seek to concretize them as trackable items to which resources can be committed.
Given that even a brief disruption in an ancestral animal-migration route can inadvertently contribute to a complete collapse in spatial knowledge — a loss that science writer Ben Goldfarb has called “as thorough as the erasure of a language” — multilateral institutions are arguably already failing in their stated mission to preserve vulnerable cultural practices if they refuse to broaden their scope.
If humanity’s greatest institutions are serious about stemming irreversible cultural loss on our planet, Papageorgiou’s proposed UNESCO amendment should be a moral baseline to build on. Plainly, if the shared traditions of other animals fit within our existing vision of what cultural practices look like, recognizing that reality really is the least we could do.
“Modern science has long since moved past the Cartesian dichotomy that once divided rational human minds from the alleged automatons of the animal kingdom.”
In broadening our horizons in this way, we must be careful not to expect other animals to fit within the narrow confines of behaviors similar to our own, which would risk excluding a vast spectrum of cultural experiences. After all, other animals can see sights, hear sounds and experience sensations we cannot. So while we can more easily notice practices that bear the hallmarks of our own first, such as tool usage and mourning lost companions, it would be a mistake to stop the cultural search there. As Beston once wrote of nonhuman animals, “we patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.”
In the course of scientific discovery, we may find that other species engage in radically new cultural traditions and practices that bear little resemblance to ours, but nonetheless have “intrinsic, irreplaceable value” for the communities involved. That value is what matters. Humanity is not the standard by which the rest of the animal kingdom should be judged. Rather, human institutions should be judged by the degree to which they recognize the role our fellow animals play in creating the culture-rich world we seek to preserve.
