Zebras crossing

Life-sized puppets of wild animals - giraffes, elephants, moose, wolves and more — are making their way around the world, bringing people together and bringing city centres to a halt. Their message is simple but powerful: if we can do this for cardboard cutouts, think what we can do, together, for the climate

- Dipanjan Sinha

Giraffes tower over office-goers in London. Wildebeest trot beside monkeys in Denmark. Wolves and zebra parade through Venice.

Herds of life-sized animal puppets have been charging through city streets, as part of a public-art project that seeks to underline the urgency of the climate crisis.

‘The Herds and its 70 recycled-wood-and-cardboard puppets will keep going, over the coming months, in what they call their “stampede around the world”.

Created by the UK-based not-for-profit public-art company The Walk Productions, they have visited 25 cities in 11 countries across Africa and Europe so far (Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Spain, France, Italy, the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Norway). In each city, they transform spaces such as public squares, beaches, marketplaces and lake shores into platforms for messages about the loss of biodiversity and the need for collective action.

In some cases, this involves precise appearances and filmed moments such as the animals roaming wild through Venice's Piazza San Marco at sunrise. In other cases, as in London's Soho, a “stampede” was organised through the busy streets, led by the puppets and made up of hundreds of local residents.

“It was during our tour with Little Amal that the idea for The Herds came about,” says Sarah Loader, executive producer with The Walk. Little Amal was a 12-ft puppet of a Syrian child refugee that “walked” 8,000 km between 2021 and 2023, to highlight injustices around displacement using theatre and storytelling.