On the BBC Radio 4 programme A Point of View (first broadcast on Friday 8 July 2011) Alain de Botton claimed that ‘animals, as we know, don’t loom very large in culture’ (de Botton, 2011); he could not have been more wrong. If only, as a schoolchild, Alain had read Bryant’s (1979) newly published paper about the zoological connection he would not have made such an error over 30 years later. Other animals are everywhere in culture; but like Mr de Botton we often fail to notice them. Perhaps the problem stems from our definitions of culture. As we use the word in everyday life, ‘culture’ has a number of meanings. We often experience ‘different cultures’ on a city break, we can be seen as having ‘no culture’ when we are uncouth, and we can be thought to be improving ourselves with ‘a bit of culture’ when we go to the theatre. For reasons discussed below, we associate ‘culture’ in all its forms with humans; however, other animals appear in all manifestations of ‘culture’. For example, ‘bullfighting’ is associated with Spanish culture; accusing someone of talking ‘bullshit’ in a meeting would be considered to be coarse; and the tale in the opera Carmen takes place on the day of a bullfight. Although other animals are central to these notions of culture, they are often invisible within them. Moreover, other animals are conventionally not seen as having culture themselves.