Flags with Animals

About Animals

Animals on national flags are usually heraldic — drawn from a country’s coat of arms — and they almost always carry political meaning. Eagles dominate: Albania, Egypt, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro and Serbia all use double-headed or single-headed eagles inherited from Byzantine, Habsburg or Aztec imagery. Lions appear on the flags of Sri Lanka and Spain. Other notable creatures include the dragon of Bhutan, the bird-of-paradise of Papua New Guinea, the quetzal of Guatemala, and the harpy eagle of Ecuador. Animal emblems were once contentious in vexillology — Whitney Smith argued that flags should be readable at distance and animals are too detailed — but they remain popular because they encode the long heraldic memory of a state. A flag with an animal almost always traces back to a medieval royal seal or a national-revolutionary movement.