We Were Told This Was an Exclusive Club
There’s a particular pleasure in belonging to a club that does not admit everyone. The chairs seem more comfortable, the drinks more thoughtfully poured, and even the silence suggests that someone has checked your references. Whether the establishment offers anything unavailable down the street is largely beside the point. Down the street, anyone can walk in.
The most successful clubs understand that exclusion requires very little explanation once it’s acquired a respectable address. A dress code helps. So does a waiting list long enough for applicants to mistake the passage of time for an assessment of character. Eventually, the members begin to regard their admission as evidence of some inherent distinction, instead of having the good fortune of knowing Philip.
Trouble begins when unfamiliar faces appear in the drawing room. They seem perfectly at ease. They understand the arrangements, make themselves useful, and display several of the qualities the membership committee has always considered indispensable. There’s a discreet cough from behind a newspaper. Someone asks who approved their applications. Someone else suggests that the entrance requirements may need clarification.
For centuries, humanity has enjoyed precisely this sort of membership. We were the clever ones: the toolmakers, the conversationalists, the creatures with complicated social lives and something to do on a Saturday night. The rest of the animal kingdom supplied the scenery, the labor, and occasionally the upholstery. Then researchers began looking more closely, and an awkward number of our distinguishing accomplishments started turning up elsewhere. We’ve responded with considerable ingenuity, much of it devoted to explaining why the latest discovery doesn’t quite count. We were told this was an exclusive club. All of a sudden, it’s becoming difficult to find an empty chair.
We Were the Ones With Tools
Tools were once among the club’s most reassuring admission requirements. Here was something solid: the ability to look at an uncooperative world and fashion an object that made it slightly more accommodating. A sharp edge, a useful lever, something for reaching dinner when dinner had sensibly placed itself out of reach.
From these modest beginnings, we eventually progressed to the cordless drill, which allows a man to spend an entire Saturday purchasing equipment for a hole that will take eleven seconds to make.
Chimpanzees have made this distinction difficult to maintain. In the Republic of Congo’s Goualougo Triangle, they manufacture termite-fishing probes from plant stems, deliberately fraying the ends into brushes. These modifications help collect more termites, and the chimpanzees repair and straighten the fibers when necessary. This is a prepared implement with a functional improvement, maintained by its user.
Somewhere in a human garage, an expensive power tool has spent fourteen months waiting for its owner to locate the charger.
If conceding a little practical ingenuity to a close relative feels tolerable, New Caledonian crows make the matter considerably less comfortable. These birds, native to islands in the southwest Pacific, manufacture hooked tools from vegetation to extract prey. Researchers have documented the selection and shaping of forked stems, including work on the hook and adjustments to the shaft. A creature without hands is making specialized equipment with its face!
One imagines this would take some of the satisfaction out of explaining the importance of opposable thumbs.
None of this puts a crow on the verge of manufacturing a suspension bridge. Human technology remains extraordinary, particularly our ability to accumulate knowledge and build things no individual could possibly make alone. But the original claim was that we made tools and the animals didn’t. Once the animals were found making them, the conversation became noticeably more particular about which tools, how complicated, and whether a hook really ought to qualify. The membership committee had some amendments to make. The crow was unavailable for comment.
Apparently, They Have Names
Remembering someone’s name is considered a basic social courtesy, which may explain why we’ve developed so many ways of avoiding it. We can remember that a man works in finance, earns more than he deserves, and left his second wife for someone who teaches Pilates. His name, however, has become inaccessible. We say “mate” or “dude” warmly, hoping our species’ celebrated command of language will carry us through another lunch.
Elephants appear to have made their own arrangements. A study published in 2024 examined calls from wild African elephants in Kenya and found evidence that they address particular individuals using distinctive, name-like sounds. Researchers used machine learning to identify patterns in the calls that helped predict whom they were intended for. More tellingly, when elephants heard recordings of calls originally addressed to them, they responded differently than when the same caller had been addressing someone else. Somewhere within the rumbling, there appeared to be an indication of who was being summoned.
This already puts the system ahead of a surprising number of family WhatsApp groups.
The especially interesting part is that these calls probably do not simply imitate the intended recipient’s own voice. The evidence suggests something closer to a vocal label - a sound used to address an individual. Scientists appropriately call these sounds “name-like”; they have not established an elephant equivalent of a birth certificate, nor decoded a complete naming system. But the possibility is enough to make our old assumptions uncomfortable. We’d imagined ourselves looking out upon an anonymous gathering of wildlife. It now seems that at least some of the gathering may be on more familiar terms.
There’s something quietly deflating about discovering that a creature we identify by species may have a more particular way of addressing its companions. To us, an elephant. To another elephant, apparently, someone specific. We should admire this without immediately demanding proof that they can also remember a surname, pronounce it correctly, and place the individual at a conference in Singapore. Our own standard of performance hardly justifies the additional requirements. We have name badges, contact lists, and a spouse whispering, “That’s David,” as David approaches. “Of course it is,” we reply. “Hello, dude.”
The Leisure Class Has Six Legs
Human beings have an impressive talent for making free time answerable to management. A walk becomes a step count. A bicycle ride produces a report. Someone takes up gardening to escape the pressures of work and, within six months, is experiencing considerable anxiety about the performance of a zucchini.
Enjoyment is still permitted, of course, but it helps if there’s evidence of improvement. Otherwise, how will we know whether we’re getting any good at relaxing?
Bumblebees seem to have approached the matter with less paperwork. In a study published in 2022, researchers at Queen Mary University of London gave them a clear route to a feeding area, along with the option of taking a detour to some small wooden balls. The bees repeatedly chose to roll the balls, despite receiving no food reward for doing so.
There was no need to move them out of the way. Lunch was accessible elsewhere. They were interrupting a perfectly serviceable journey to do something apparently unnecessary - a decision we might find easier to respect if they’d called it a wellness break.
The researchers found that the behavior met established criteria for animal play: it was voluntary, repeated without being rigidly mechanical, and served no obvious immediate survival function. Younger bees rolled more balls than older ones, adding a familiar generational detail to an already unsettling discovery. This does not give us direct access to a bumblebee’s feelings, but it supports the possibility that the activity was rewarding in itself. We are reasonably comfortable watching a dog enjoy a ball. Discovering comparable behavior in an insect requires a more substantial adjustment to the seating plan.
What makes this particularly awkward is the bee’s reputation for industry. We’ve spent generations holding it up as an example of purposeful labor, only to discover that it may occasionally prefer to have a little fun. Maybe play has benefits we’ve yet to establish; an activity can be enjoyable and useful without its participant drawing up a business case. Still, there’s something enviable about the apparent simplicity of the arrangement. A ball was available. The bee rolled it. Had we organized the proceedings, there would have been a beginners’ course, a premium ball, and a device informing the bee that its previous session had been better.
Getting Along Without a Team-Building Retreat
There comes a point in certain organizations when people who work together every day are taken somewhere expensive to learn how to work together. A facilitator distributes colored cards. Someone from accounts discovers he is predominantly yellow. By late afternoon, six adults are attempting to construct a tower from drinking straws, while the person who could have fixed their actual problem is back at the office, awaiting authorization.
Dinner offers an opportunity to discuss what everyone has learned about trust. The following Monday, the departments resume withholding information from one another.
Chimpanzees have demonstrated a more direct approach to recruitment. In experiments reported in 2006, they recognized when obtaining food required a partner and recruited help accordingly. Given experience with different collaborators, they also preferred the more effective one. This is a modest finding with substantial implications: they could identify both the need for assistance and someone capable of providing it. Nobody had to describe themselves as a passionate, results-driven team player. There were results, and the chimpanzees appear to have noticed who helped produce them.
For a less familiar example of social investment, consider the vampire bat, whose reputation rarely gets beyond the catering arrangements. These bats share meals of regurgitated blood with selected companions.
In a study tracking previously unfamiliar captive bats over fifteen months, researchers found that new food-sharing relationships were preceded by increasing amounts of social grooming. Even unrelated individuals could gradually develop these bonds, beginning with relatively inexpensive attention before progressing to a more costly contribution. We should resist translating this too neatly into human friendship, but the progression is recognizable. You get to know someone before deciding how much of your dinner you are prepared to share.
None of this makes the animal kingdom a harmonious workplace. Cooperation can be selective, practical, and beneficial to those involved, without requiring universal goodwill. What these examples disturb is the notion that we alone possess the social equipment for recognizing useful partners or building relationships over time. Other creatures have arrangements of their own, some apparently quite durable. Meanwhile, we’ve booked another retreat because the first one failed to produce lasting change. This time there will be a ropes course.
Unfortunately, They Also Have Politics
It would be nice to stop at cooperation. We could admire the helpful chimpanzees, applaud the generous bats, and emerge with a reassuring picture of nature as a community project with unusually good attendance. Unfortunately, the ability to work together doesn’t specify what everyone will be working towards. Sometimes it’s dinner. Sometimes it’s making sure another group doesn’t get any. The same social talents that help establish a circle of friends can also establish who will be standing outside it.
In Western Australia’s Shark Bay, male bottlenose dolphins maintain alliances within a larger network of alliances, cooperating in competition over access to females. Research published in 2022 found that relationships between these groups mattered to the males’ success, beyond simply belonging to a large alliance. Having allies was useful; having allies with useful allies was better. This complicates the dolphin’s public image as an amiable ocean resident whose principal interests are swimming and looking pleased. Beneath the surface, there are relationships to cultivate and competing interests to manage. One begins to suspect that the smile tells us very little.
Chimpanzees add a territorial dimension. A three-year study of neighboring groups in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park found that they used hilltops in ways consistent with gathering information about rivals. Near territorial boundaries, they were more likely to climb hills and spend time quietly listening;
their subsequent movements suggested that what they heard helped inform whether to advance. This is a considerably less comforting use of intelligence than extracting termites. It also introduces the awkward possibility that a chimpanzee may assess the position of its opponents before committing to a confrontation - a precaution humans have occasionally treated as optional.
Calling this “politics” is a comparison, rather than evidence that dolphins have manifestos or chimpanzees maintain foreign ministries. Nor does finding roots of our behavior in nature make aggression inevitable or excuse what we do with it. But it does weaken the flattering story in which animals act on crude impulses while we navigate a higher realm of strategy, allegiance, and competing interests. Apparently, we aren’t the only ones who form alliances and size up the opposition. We may simply be the ones who hold a press conference afterwards to explain why it was necessary.
Happy Hour Started Way Early
Having surrendered our exclusive claims to tools, names, leisure, and political maneuvering, we might reasonably hope to retain the drinks cabinet. Here, surely, is a recognizably human institution: the deliberate transformation of perfectly respectable ingredients into something that makes us more entertaining to ourselves.
We’ve built ceremonies around it, developed specialised glassware, and trained people to detect a suggestion of leather in a liquid that nobody would purchase if it were described as tasting of shoes. It’d be disappointing to discover that nature had opened the bar long before we started mixing.
Fermentation has never required our supervision. Yeasts turn sugars into alcohol in fruit and nectar without consulting a distiller, applying for a license, or commissioning a label featuring someone’s grandfather. A scientific review published in 2024 argued that animal consumption of naturally occurring alcohol is more widespread than previously assumed. For fruit-eating creatures, ethanol can arrive as part of an ordinary meal. Whether they seek it for its effects is a separate, largely unresolved question. The chemistry was there long before us; the tasting fee came later.
Chimpanzees have supplied a particularly sociable example. In Guinea-Bissau’s Cantanhez National Park, researchers filmed them sharing fermented African breadfruit on ten occasions, with tested fruit reaching the equivalent of 0.61 per cent alcohol by volume.
This was no forest cocktail party: the study established neither drunkenness nor a deliberate pursuit of it, but it did raise questions about possible social benefits. Their restraint is almost inconvenient. Nobody was filmed announcing that they loved everybody, explaining what was wrong with the leadership, or suggesting they all invest in a restaurant together.
Actual intoxication is another matter, and fermented fruit can cause it. Veterinary reports have described birds with impaired coordination after eating berries; one investigation recorded a young blackbird using its wings and the enclosure walls to stay upright. Such cases can be dangerous, and they don’t establish that the birds intended to become drunk. There’s no label on the berries, nor a waiter suggesting that a second bush would pair beautifully with the insects.
The bird may simply have misjudged lunch. Humans have fewer grounds for surprise when an evening involving three bottles ends with someone requiring assistance from the furniture. We were given the alcohol content in writing.
Our strongest claim to distinction may therefore lie in everything we have arranged around the experience. An animal eats fermented fruit, and we call it an unfortunate encounter with ethanol. A human pays handsomely for fermented fruit, rotates it in a very large glass, and explains that it has opened up beautifully. Calling something “oak-forward” lends the proceedings a dignity rarely extended to an overripe mango. The club may have lost another membership requirement, but it can still charge for drinks. Maybe the truly human achievement was persuading someone to pay more because the fruit came from a particular hillside. Then charging extra to tell them about the hillside.
We Were Told This Was an Exclusive Club
By now, that exclusive club has become rather crowded. A crow has brought its own equipment, the elephants know whom they’re talking to, and a bumblebee is enjoying itself without recording a personal best. Somewhere outside, the chimpanzees are assessing the neighbors. The drinks, it turns out, were available before we arrived. We could complain to the management, but we are the management - which has been part of the problem all along.
None of this necessarily makes being human a disappointment. We have music, anesthesia, sourdough bread, and people who will cross a city at midnight because someone they love needs company. We’ve also invented the automated customer-service menu, so any assessment should allow for a fairly broad range. Our achievements survive the discovery that other creatures possess abilities we once claimed for ourselves. A good meal loses nothing because somebody at the next table is also eating well.
What becomes harder to defend is the assumption that a life must resemble ours before anything interesting can be happening inside it. We’ve been remarkably confident about creatures whose conversations we can’t follow and whose experience we can barely imagine. Maybe a little acknowledged uncertainty would improve our manners. We might spend more time watching, less time administering entrance exams, and occasionally resist the urge to make every discovery about our own position in the seating plan.
There are worse things than finding out you belong to a larger, stranger company than you expected. The world acquires a little more depth; the other lives moving through it become harder to dismiss. We can pull up a chair without surrendering everything we like about ourselves. Someone should probably warn the newcomers about the politics, though. And if a man approaches their table offering to explain the hillside for an additional fee, they should keep a firm grip on the fruit.
Authors Note: Having discovered that membership in the clever-species club comes with fewer exclusive privileges than advertised, we might as well visit the gift shop. These three items should help us identify one another, improve the neighbors’ dining arrangements, and investigate where our assessment of the neighbors went wrong.
Elephants appear to manage individual introductions through sophisticated vocal communication. We require stationery. These name tag stickers offer a practical solution for anyone who can remember your promotion, your divorce, and what you paid for your apartment, but has spent the last twenty minutes hoping someone else will say your name. Write clearly. Our species has enough disadvantages already. Get yours here.
A wine bottle repurposed as a bird feeder brings a little restaurant atmosphere to the garden. Fill it with birdseed and allow the local clientele to dine from something with a more distinguished silhouette than a plastic tray. The contents are strictly food, though you’re welcome to describe the seed mix as earthy, well-balanced, and particularly expressive of the hillside. Whether the birds will pay extra remains doubtful. Order yours here.
For anyone wondering how we managed to underestimate so many creatures for so long, primatologist Frans de Waal examines animal intelligence and the human assumptions that have obscured it. It’s a fitting companion to this post, with considerably more research and fewer jokes about the drinks cabinet. Buy it for yourself, or for someone who remains absolutely certain that humans are the smartest animals in every room. They’ll recognize it as a compliment until they start reading. Get your copy here.
As always, any purchases made through these links help support the continued production of essays examining the thin and increasingly questionable line between human civilization and organized nonsense.
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