Current Issue

Haslam, M., & Desmond, A. (2026). Why don’t all animals use tools? Animal Behavior and Cognition, 13(3), 319-342.  https://doi.org/10.26451/abc.13.03.07.2026

Tools give humans superpowers, so why don’t all animals use them? Though technology is ubiquitous in our own species, we remain unable to predict when, why, and among whom tool use will arise elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Recent decades’ research by biologists, ethologists, and archaeologists has displaced a longstanding scientific rendering of humans as the exclusive tool-using taxon. Tool users inhabit diverse bodies and environments; from ants to archerfish, crabs to cockatoos. Many of these animals engage in tool use with bodies, minds, and sensory apparatuses, in habitats, and at scales very unlike our own. Given this recent sea-change in our understanding of who can be a tool user, we are presented with an opportunity to return to first principles. What exactly is tool use? Who are tool users, and what unites them? Is it possible—or even useful—to identify common traits, qualities, circumstances, or conditions among phylogenetically disparate tool-users? What does tool use tell us that we need to know? Here we take a pragmatic approach and define tools as enabling objects, and tool use as attentional use of such objects, agnostic to neural and physical anatomy. In reviewing animal technologies we identify active, timely feedback loops as critical for tool use adoption. Cybernetics emerges as an appropriate analytical framework; tool-using animals are temporary natural cyborgs. Ideas from game theory and behavioral economics then inform how technological innovations stabilize or vanish. We conclude that while nearly all animals can use tools, many face prohibitive physical, sensory, and social constraints, coupled to chance events. Viewing this behavior not as a fixed trait but as contingent, dynamic and continually reliant on environmental support offers insight into captive animal tool use and the partial uptake of tools in cohabiting groups. Our approach situates the hyper-reliance of humans on tools within our evolutionary milieu, and eliminates the need for special pleading when tool use arises in nonhuman contexts.

Tool use, Technology, Feedback, Cyborg, Umwelt, Evolutionarily stable strategy