Cooking specifically in reference to applying heat to a food: yes! Humans are the only ones!
But in a broader sense, other animals do craft specialized foods :)
Bees dehydrate a mixture of spit and nectar to make honey.
Damselfish farm specific species of algae - defending their plots vigorously, since they can only digest a few kinds.
A species of Yeti crab farms bacteria, raising colonies on its long claws and helpfully holding them near nutrient-rich undersea vents.
Leaf cutter ants chew up food, fertilize it with their own excrement, and then innoculate the mixture with a special fungus! The fungus then grows fruiting bodies, which the ants eat. Little farmers :)
Fungus farming emerged only once in ants. In wood-boring beetles, it evolved independently eleven times. Today there are roughly 3,200 species of ambrosia beetles, none larger than a grain of rice, that raise fungi in chambers tunnelled out of dead trees. The beetles have evolved specialised pockets on their bodies to carry the big sticky spores of fungi when they move on after exhausting their host tree. (Pockets!) Each group of ambrosia beetles has one or several species of fungi it prefers to raise, but all of them produce nourishing globules not found in fungi that are not associated with beetles.
The black garden ant raises aphids as a form of animal husbandry- feeding and protecting them, herding them from one branch to another like little green sheep, and harvesting the tasty sap they produce when well-fed. When the herd grows too large, the ants will eat the aphids!
There’s a species of (I think it was a vole or shrew?) that harvests tough grass and leaves it in its den for days to decompose a bit so it’s easier to digest - habitual fermentation :D
(Unfortunately, rumors of elephants leaving fruit to ferment and get drunk is only rumors. There’s no evidence that they actually do that - they prefer fresh fruit right off the branches)
While many other animals have sex, farm, ferment food and even raise livestock for meat and drink…. (some even keep pets!) humans are the only one to cook with heat.
Cheers, you beautiful motherfuckers
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