Are we the only animal that not only uses fire, but likes to play with it?

Holding my dog as the local fireworks boomed in the background made me wonder about this.  Man is not the only tool making/using animal.  Whales make ‘bubble’ nets to coral fish to feed on.  Chimpanzees and Bonobos use twigs and such to dig insects out of holes.  Sea otters use stones to hammer mussels against to open them.  So there are plenty of example of other animals using and sometimes (chimpanzees) fashioning tools to use, but fire?

My husband said this fire thing comes from my Mathey side of the family…we do like a good bonfire.  I responded that perhaps that means we link closest to the humans who took up the first flame for usefulness, or fun.

But thinking about it, there are many examples of animals manipulating their environments, birds build nests of varying degrees of complexity.  Many mammals dig burrows some very complex and in ways that breezes cool them in hot prairie like environments.  Ants, termites, bees and wasps construct structures with heating and cool possibilities.  (I won’t say ‘in mind’.)  And we could go on and on.

But fire.  We’ve used it for herding prey, clearing land, creating utensils, destroying each other, creating art (fireworks?) and oh yeah cooking food, which releases more nutrients in forms our bodies find easier to digest.

Who picked up that first ember, got it by the right end and said, “This is some pretty cool s&*t!  Hey, look what I’ve got?  I’ve got a burning stick!”