The paper presents the results of a corpus-based contrastive study of English and Serbian proverbs with animal names that contain conceptual metaphors. The aim of the analysis was to determine to what extent are these conceptual metaphors universal and language-specific. The most frequent conceptual metaphors that are found both in English and Serbian proverbs are PEOPLE are ANIMALS and PROBLEMS/SUBSTANCES are ANIMALS. However, these generic metaphors are not always supported by the same specific metaphors in English and Serbian. The analysis shows which English proverbs have a formal or semantic equivalent in Serbian, or have no equivalents at all. What is also discussed is the prototypical choice of basic images and traditional sybolism that appears in these proverbs. (Diana Prodanovic-Stankic)