Chimpanzees in Arnhem’s Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands had learned zookeepers’ rule that meals wouldn’t be served until all had assembled. But one day, as reported by Time magazine in 2007, two teenage chimps were more interested in staying out to play than coming in to eat. The others had to wait for hours, getting hungrier and angrier. When the two errant chimps finally showed up, zookeepers protected them from the others’ wrath in a separate enclosure overnight. But when they joined the group the next day, the others pummelled them, teaching them some manners. That night, those two were the first in for dinner.

Many Indigenous philosophies consider that we humans are the “younger brothers of creation,” including animals, and that they have lessons to teach us. For millennia before we showed up on the scene, social animals — those living in societies and cooperating for survival — had been creating cultures imbued with ethics. As Bekoff writes, “The origins of virtue, egalitarianism and morality are more ancient than our own species.”

In the opinion of some Australian anthropologists, notes ethologist Temple Grandin, early humans watched wolves and were educated by them. Indigenous Australians put it more directly, saying, “dogs make us human.” Millions of years before us, wolf ethos included babysitting the pups, sharing food with those too injured, sick or old to hunt and including friends in their packs, beyond the genetic kin. Wolf ethics also included being both a good individual and a good pack member.

Human societies, while often quite different from one to the next, generally have a shared ethos similar to that of wolves: Look after the young; protect the tribe; consider the needs of the sick, injured or old; and value the cooperation of others who may not be kin (friends, in other words). It is biomimicry applied to the ethical world. Wolves were doing it first, and we aped them. –Jay Griffiths, NOEMA