Burning Libraries: Why Do We Diminish the Cultural Memory of the Wild as Mere ‘Instinct'?

When conservationists relocated bighorn sheep to the remote slopes of the Rocky Mountains to save them from the brink of extinction and restore their populations, they encountered a profound anomaly. Released into their new home, the animals did not migrate. Stranded in the middle of a vast, unfamiliar geography, they remained completely stationary, oblivious to how to navigate the high-altitude peaks or where to find safe foraging grounds before winter set in.

For decades, the biological dogma shaped by human perception assured us that these wild herbivores would simply activate the magical "instincts" carved into their genetic codes over millions of years. But the paralysis of the sheep shattered that myth. The migratory routes these animals had followed for centuries were not a genetic reflex; they were shared, learned, and meticulously transmitted cultural knowledge. During the relocation, the elders of the herd—the carriers of that culture—were left behind. In this new geography, there was no "cultural transmission" remaining to guide them. We might have physically saved these animals from a localized extinction, but by dropping them onto a new mountain without their elders, we had essentially struck a match to a massive library written over generations.

This silent tragedy flawlessly exposes the massive blind spot in how modern humanity perceives the world and other species: our profound delusion of assuming nature is merely a functioning machine made of genes, flesh, and bone.

The Borders of "Heritage" and Our Anthropocentric Perception

Humanity possesses an insatiable desire to build colossal institutional frameworks just to document how unique our own culture is. The "Intangible Cultural Heritage" list, maintained by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), undoubtedly stands as a vital archive for recording human history. Yet, as our understanding of nature deepens, it also opens the traditional limits of our heritage perception to philosophical scrutiny.

Our definition of heritage is so anthropocentric that alongside values like the artisanal know-how of the French baguette or Swiss watchmaking craftsmanship, practices where animals are explicitly exploited as tools—such as Belgian shrimp fishing on horseback or the Mexican equestrian traditions of La Charreada—are also protected and funded as "unique cultural values" meant to be passed down to future generations.

Yet, the ancient cultures built by the other minds sharing this exact planet cannot even get near this human-centric roster. While human rainmaking prayers in Botswana are safeguarded as a valuable heritage, the dramatic rain rituals documented years ago by renowned primatologist Jane Goodall in the Gombe forests—where chimpanzees rhythmically drag branches and vocalize beneath waterfalls, a practice taught across generations—remain entirely outside this paradigm.

The distinct dialects of sperm whale clans echoing in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, taught by every clan for generations and originating from a time far older than Sanskrit, are nowhere to be found in our heritage pool. In northwestern India, blackbucks gather annually in highly specific courtship arenas. Here, males carve shallow depressions in the soil with their horns for females to rest in. This social practice of lekking, which ensures the continuation of the species and is transmitted from generation to generation, has yet to find a place in our shared perception of value.

The sole reason for this is our blind adherence to an outdated Cartesian fallacy: the belief that animals do not think, they merely react. Zooarchaeologist Sarah Newman of the University of Chicago aptly summarizes this historical hypocrisy:

"When humans make and do things, we assume we do them simply because it is our culture, and we call those changes 'history.' When animals do things, we call it 'instinct,' not culture. When the things they make and do change over time, we call it 'evolution,' not history."

The Second Inheritance System: Learning Beyond Genes

Today, however, the scientific world has finally begun to dismantle this thick wall it resisted for so long. In a world where climates and habitats are shifting rapidly, relying solely on genetic mutations to survive is exceptionally slow. As primatologist Andrew Whiten of the University of St. Andrews emphasizes in his groundbreaking work, there is a much faster and more flexible second inheritance system built on top of genetics in the wild: social learning.

European tit birds that learned to open milk bottle caps from one another and spread the practice across an entire continent; bumblebees that teach each other how to pull strings to reach food; Japanese macaques that invented the tradition of washing sweet potatoes in seawater and disseminated it to the whole colony; or chimpanzees that endure months of apprenticeship to learn from their masters exactly which stone to use to crack a nut. All these creatures create solutions that their genetic codes did not innately provide simply by observing one another, and they preserve this knowledge across generations.

The Denied Consciousness: Animal Grief

Where our attempt to attribute culture exclusively to humans stumbles most is in the face of death. One of the most deeply rooted anthropological taboos in the world is the belief that mourning and showing respect for the dead is uniquely human.

Yet, scientific observations quietly dismantle this old assumption. It has recently been documented that Asian elephants in the Bengal region of India carry their deceased calves to trenches in tea estates to bury them in the earth, a ritual accompanied by loud, agonizing cries from the entire herd. This animal mourning is a recognized biological reality. On the other hand, it is another well-known fact among researchers that African elephants cover their dead with branches and, even when passing through that area years later, inevitably fall into absolute silence around the old bones to perform a sort of memorial ceremony.

Animal grief is not just the expression of a purely biological pain; it is a social culture developed, taught, and shared within specific communities. The idea that another species possesses a consciousness so similar to ours—one that suffers, learns, and ritualizes its sorrow—fundamentally threatens the myth of the lonely and unparalleled human we have constructed over millennia.

Saving Only the Body: Cultural Extinction

This historical habit of placing humans at the center has caused our wildlife conservation policies to be built upon a massive blind spot. As biologist Emma Carroll of the University of Auckland starkly warns, when we try to protect an endangered species, our sole focus is on saving their genetic codes and physical bodies.

However, when we fragment their habitats, sever herds from one another with massive highways, or alter the climate, we completely obliterate the intricate network of knowledge these animals have transmitted from generation to generation. In scientific literature, this is known as Cultural Extinction. And rest assured, this process is an end at least as brutal and irreversible as physical extinction.

When an old elephant matriarch—the only living being who remembers how to reach underground water during severe droughts in Africa—is killed by poachers, that herd does not just lose a leader; it loses its survival guide, its library. A whale that can no longer hear its clan’s song due to human-induced ocean noise (anthropophony) and cannot learn deep-sea hunting tactics from them is physically alive; it breathes in and out. However, it has been severed from the unique, millennia-old social heritage that makes it a member of its species. They become refugees in their own forests, their own oceans. Even if they exist physically, spiritually and culturally, they have long gone extinct.

Much like the profound homesickness a person feels within their own home while watching their birthplace and city be destroyed—a phenomenon known as solastalgia—animals are left stranded in the massive void of a cultural memory that has been stripped from them, never to return.

What Are We Actually Saving?

Recently, a coalition of scientists published a powerful manifesto in the journal Nature Sustainability, demanding that global institutions expand our horizons by explicitly protecting non-human cultural heritage just as they do human heritage. Because in the most remote corners of the world, communicating in languages we may never fully comprehend, libraries far older and more complex than ours continue to burn right before our eyes.

While our institutions continue their vital work of recording human history, we must now ask ourselves a very simple, yet profound question: When we strive to save wildlife, is our actual goal to protect living, breathing, learning, and culture-producing societies? Or are we simply stripping them of their intelligence, their memories, and their cultures, reducing them to genetically sustained, soulless museum exhibits just so we can watch them on documentaries in the future?

If an animal’s body is saved but its culture is left to die, has that animal truly been saved at all?