Why aren’t we ambidextrous, do other animals have a dominant hand/paw?
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Yes; most animals have dominant appendages; it improves reaction times.
As with humans, that dominance isn’t a given thing, with some animals being ambidextrous or alternate limbed.
Mammals tend to have a similar distribution to humans.
My brother is somewhat ambidextrous. When he was a kid he could write with both hands simultaneously. I’ve heard it’s common to lose the ability as we age.
As pointed out by other posters, ambidexterity is not common.
Most great apes, Chimps, bonobos, gorillas etc seem to have a preferred hand and it is generally the right one. This seems to even reach the sea mammals as they have fins/flippers that generally are right leaning.
“Just as most people are right-handed – a trait, remember, controlled by the left side of the brain – so do most people do the bulk of their linguistic processing in their brain’s left hemisphere. … Right-handedness, then, may simply be an accidental by-product of the way most of our brains”
(By Jason G Goldman
16th December 2014)
I write with my left hand but throw with my right hand, I’m not ambidextrous?
Some of us are, and [some of them do](https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/do-other-animals-show-handedness/).
Variety is the spice of evolution.
It’s beneficial to specialize using one hand for each task. Training both requires many times the expended effort and gains nothing (unless you lose a hand which is clearly unlikely from an evolutionary standpoint as losing a hand usually meant dying).
Other animals do have dominant paws. Cats for example. I believe it’s more common for female cats to have a right dominant paw and male cats to have a left dominant paw
Yes, in fact, elephants have a dominant tusk. You can see which tusk is used more on older elephants.
More examples for fun, parrots have dominant feet. Mine prefers ‘shake hands’ with his left foot.
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