My ringneck parrots dunk their food in water before they eat it. I think they do this because of poor saliva flow.
I’m sure I’ve read of some sort of insect that actually makes bread: They grind up grains, mix them with liquids, and let it harden in the sun. Googling is just giving me a bunch of human-made bread with insects in it, though.
I have heard that raccoons wash their food and I could swear that I have seen it on wildlife videos. In any case, raccoons certainly aren’t dumb. They are among the smartest of North American wildlife and great problem solvers. They can figure out how to open just about anything and their front paws have as much dexterity as most types of monkeys. They generally don’t need to prepare their food where they are most often encountered - campgrounds and suburban areas. It is already prepared for them. However, they definitely pick through trash cans or wherever else they find food and carefully select the food that they like while leaving the rest. I have been terrorized by more raccoons than I can count over the years and they will go to great lengths to get food that they want. Even metal trash cans secured with locked chains aren’t always enough to keep them out. They are the Houdinis of the animal world.
Some animals may not prepare their own food but they have learned to appreciate the good life like these alcoholic monkeys (really) on the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean. They may or may not know how to mix a good drink themselves but they certainly know how to get them.
Crows would use our truck wash to soak old chicken bones they gathered from the amusement park next to our shop.
Sea otters use rocks to open up clams and such that they eat. Not much food prep, and certainly not cooking, but at least curious.
See Breland & Breland, The Misbehavior of Organisms , 1961 (first published in American Psychologist, 16, 681-684).
They taught a raccoon to pick up coins, put them into a container, to be redeemed later for food. The raccoon quickly got into the habit of rubbing the coins together. Breland & Breland believed that the raccoon had transferred its washing behavior from the food to the coins that had become tokens for food.
There’s whatever bees do to nectar to turn it into honey.
Also, I read somewhere on the internet, so you know it’s true, that elephants will stomp on fruit to mash it up, then come back a week or two later to eat the fermented results, get drunk, then rampage through a village. Good times.
Do zombies in zombie threads cook their own brains? Welcome back 2006 I missed you!