Cats, dogs, bears, owls, weasels. Most of them could seriously injure/kill an average human with minor difficulty and yet we find them adorable?
Does not compute.
We naturally find baby-like features cute, such as:
- chubbiness
- big eyes
- small size (this doesn’t always apply ofc)
- cute noises (such as meowing in cats or babbling in babies)
- last but not least, fluffiness. Modern human babies are hairless, yes, but personally I think this is some kind of ‘fossil trait’ (yes I just made that term up) because we evolved from animals that used to be more fluffy. Besides, fluffiness often makes an animal more round, thus adding to the chubbiness factor.
Now, let’s take a look at this pomerian:
This is a predator, yes, but way too small (and docile since this pom is a domesticated anomal) to pose a threat to a human, and who could be scared of that adorable little guy?
This has everything a cute animal needs: it’s small, has round black eyes, and is very fluffy, which makes it look round and be a nice cuddle buddy. So your brain goes “ooh, little baby! I must protect and cherish it!”, and boom, pet.
That being said, the human brain is a complex and really weird thing, lots of things we do don’t make any sense.
It depends on the predator. Very few people call snakes or spiders cute, them being the two animals with phobias topping every list of phobias (going so far as to inspire notions that fear of them are biologically imprinted in our psyche). Maybe it’s the venom.
I feel like the whole danger noodle and whole puppy face love for pythons in the last tenish years has really changed a lot of opinions. Snek adorbs, as they say.
And spiders have also been getting better light with at least a lot of people finding jumping spiders adorable.
I think it is more than a notion that humans have instinctual fears of many things, like snakes and spiders as you say but also blood and disfigurement by disease. Similarly many animals have conditioned fears of humans, we can be very dangerous and unnaturally violent, the killer ape.
The venom is secondary. The primary reason is that our sleeping state provides the conditions of a good sanctuary for them, so they often get close in order to rest or nest and everyone gets spooked once we wake up.
To snakes, we’re warm and provide shelter.
To spiders, our open mouths, ears or even nose are hidey-holes that provide near perfect conditions for them to rest in or ambush prey.
Which is why waking up and finding them around is very traumatizing and often startles them into retaliating for self-defense.
Brb getting killed by a weasel
You joke but a weasel could cause serious damage if it was determined enough. They’re extremely agile and hard to hold onto because they can bite you no matter where you grab them.
Like a snake but with claws.
I’ve seen weasels in the wild. They are tiny.
Depends a bit on what you want to consider a “weasel”
The weasel family (mustildae) is pretty diverse, we don’t necessarily call everything in that family a “weasel” but that distinction is somewhat arbitrary.
It includes all manner of critters from the Least Weasel (yes, that’s seriously what someone decided to call the smallest weasel) that can be as small as about 4½" in length and weigh about an ounce or so
Up to Giant Otters that can reach about 5’7" in length or Sea Otters that can weigh about 100lbs
And in between you have some things like badgers and wolverines
Otters, wolverines, and badgers are mustelids but not in the greater weasel family.
Weasels encompass a decent sized group of species. Some of which can get up to 60lbs.
Even the small ones can take down prey up to 10x their size.
If a weasel wanted to fuck you up it very well could. Even if you kill it you’ll have a lot of scars to show for it.
Excellent question! I was pondering exactly this conundrum just the other day while watching a snow leopard on BBC Earth. That thing would rip your face off but wow, what a gorgeous beast! I almost ache to pet it.
Actually my pondering went even further. Not only are cats and owls and bears cute, they are much cuter than than our cousins the primates. And it get worse! I for one find that monkeys are cuter than apes, and that our closest cousins the chimpanzees are really pretty fugly indeed. Even the babies. Maybe especially the babies.
What a weird world.
It’s a bit like how people closely related to you are not attractive.
Except in Alabama
Ha. Except, jokes aside, I’m not sure it’s true. Obviously this is getting into dangerous territory but, as I understand it, people do tend to go for their own ethnic group disproportionately.
Then again, sexual attraction does seem to be qualitatively different. After all, that snow leopard would go straight to the friend zone if you know what I mean.
This is an evolved trait. Cute babies are less likely to be eaten. Over time, babies become more cute because they were selected for.
They are the end results of millions of years of evolution prioritizing speed, strength, and stealth.
They are simply elegant and have to be strongly assertive to survive.
They have a spark of danger while we’re not living in competition with them, or for most of us, we’re not in any danger from them.
They share a number of qualities of things most humans would be attracted to aesthetically.
They’re the pro athletes of the animal world.
If you picked an animal to come back as if you were reincarnated, would you want to be a rabbit or a cow when you could be an eagle or a shark?
Most aren’t killing for fun (looking at you, house cats!), they’re just doing what is required of them to survive. It’s a brutal world for all wild animals, from the single celled to a whale. A predator is no worse than anything else trying to make it to the next tomorrow.
It’s funny you say this because I’ve heard people who believe in karma and reincarnation talk about coming back as a tiger like it’s bad thing.
Interesting. I tried looking it up quick but didn’t see anything that would be bad. Buddhism and Hinduism seem to regard tigers as symbols of strength and valor and as protectors. There are an almost infinite number of beliefs though, so I won’t doubt others believe the opposite just as well.
The only guess I could come up with is maybe if you were a tiger people would ask be afraid of you and possibly want to hurt you for being so potentially dangerous.
Predators have forward facing eyes; prey animals usually have eyes that are wider apart. We have forward facing eyes, so predators look more ‘human.’
I think part of it is that predators instinctively attract our attention—they fascinate us so we don’t get used to them and turn our backs on them.
I think this is a big part of it. Predators are stimulating and demand our attention. For most people spiders and snakes do so in a way that is upsetting, but because mammalian predators are less alien to us (and many resemble the cats and dogs we’ve domesticated) they’re attractive rather than repellent. But while I might find a lion adorable in video, I’m sure if one walked into my garden I’d be extremely fucking attentive.
Also, mammalian and avian predators are perceptive enough that they could tell we were acting like prey if we reacted to them the way we do to snakes and spiders. Alert attention without fear or aggression is probably the safest way to interact with such predators without provoking them—natural selection doesn’t care why we behave that way, as long as we do it.
That’s a very good point! So that crazy desire to try and give a bear a cuddlewuddle isn’t just a crazy deathwish, it might actually confuse the beast so much that he doesn’t try to eat you!
Maybe it has something to do with our coevolution with canines? Just speculation on my part.
At least for cats and dogs, part of the explanation is simply that we’ve kept and bred them as pets for a long time. Them being predators made them useful as a pet, as you could take dogs out for hunting and cats became useful when we started doing agriculture, where they could independently hunt the rodents on the fields and in our storage rooms.
The things we find cute are not necessarily the things which we associate with predators. We find prey animals cute too.
The peacock jumping spider is cute af.
Humans are relatively defenseless but specialize in child rearing.
This gives us an advantage in taking pets. If you’re gonna form a bond with an animal it’s better if that animal is a predator because they can fight more effectively.
It makes more sense to give scritchy-witchies to a grizzly-wizzly than to a bunny-wun.
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You just listed a bunch of mammals, not a representative sample of predators. You think lobsters and spiders are cuter than cuter than deer and koalas?
edit: oops, 4 mammals and a bird
Owls are not mammals. Also many people think certain spiders are cute and same with many lizards and amphibians.
Frogs are cute, jumping spiders are cute, geckos are cute. They’re all predators but they’re still cute
Jumping spiders are kinda cute.
Good point.
Which raises another paradox: attractive does not seem to be a proxy for appetizing.
At least for most people. Personally I find lobsters creepy as hell and would never even touch one much less eat it.
