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.
kindred spirits
Maybe it has something to do with our coevolution with canines? Just speculation on my part.
game recognizes game
“Who’s a cute little pedophile?”
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.
Why do humans find humans attractive?
That’s kind of a dumb question. Reproduction.
I’m not gonna fuck an animal just because I find it cute.
Evolutionarily I’m gonna wanna fuck another person I find cute because dna says procreate or the species dies.
It’s only a dumb question is you don’t think a little further. Go on, you can do 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
I think it’s more like an uncanny valley phenomenon. Or it could be that humans are largely neotenous and other primates haven’t developed that trait, so they remind us of old, or diseased members of our own species at a unconscious level.
Or it could be both. Strange hairy men that live in the woods? Avoidance response activated.
Yep, that’s the self-domestication thesis. Humans have selected themselves to look young and inoffensive, a bit like how they transformed wild ox into cows and wolves into, uh, poodles.
It definitely explains the ape paradox.
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.
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 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.
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 sort of like snakes, but am hesitant to handle them because 1) they’re wild creatures and therefore unpredictable and 2) I heard that they will poo on you if they’re alarmed. I don’t need that. It’s more practical than visceral.
Spiders? Hell no. It’s not even an option.
Most people I know fall on either one side or the other. It’s not a bad ice-breaker or conversation starter.
Those that don’t think spiders are cute hasn’t seen a jumping spider wearing a water droplet like a jaunty hat.
Wait until you hear the double standard about how humans saw baby seals. Humans are awfully picky about what they find cute and what they don’t find cute. Like, I find Hyenas cute, but people largely don’t.
Agreed. I find rodents cute. Rats absolutely included.
Then there’s the dog question. My position:
- huskies, collies, spitzes - cute
- labradors, dachshunds - moderately cute
- poodles, pugs, bloodhounds - not cute (at all)
we are configured to find child-like things cute, and they theyre appearance throws a lot of that at us.
owls have giant, child-like eyeballs. bears have roly-poly bodies…
If not friend, why friend shaped?
Ask Little Red Riding Hood.
“Why such big teeth?” “To better eat you.”
I suspect that there’s a relationship between cute and being eaten by the parents of cute.
I like spiders. wait fuck they are predators too. the only animal which I can think of that aren’t, are fish, and heck yeah, one of my favorite animals IN THEORY but they just suck, I mean they are in the water, how will you cuddle or form a bond, you will drown upon entering the fish’s dome, it will suffocate upon entering your world. it is an impossible relationship, it cannot be. I want floating fish in air, can someone engineer this
We’re predators ourselves, so if we couldn’t find predatory aspects (large, forward-facing eyes, for example) to be cute our babies would get left on hillsides.
It’s not something I’d generally consider to be one of my kinks, but I remember one time noticing a girl I know has somewhat more prominent than average canine teeth. Not ridiculously exaggerated vampire fangs or anything, definitely within the range of normal variation of the human species, but towards the upper end of that range, just a tiny bit longer and pointier than most.
And that did something for me. Like the primal reptilian part of my brain was saying “yesss, now there’s a female you can go and hunt mammoths with”
It surely didn’t hurt that she is otherwise very conventionally attractive, but in that moment it wasn’t the great tits, ass, pretty face, blue eyes, long blonde hair, etc. that caught my eye, it was those carnivore teeth.
She’s also been an on-again/off-again vegetarian as long as I’ve known her, and has expressed some interest in hunting, so I think her own lizard-brain also seems to have some strong thoughts on the matter.
somewhat more prominent than average canine teeth
this is definitely a “thing”
on the opposite end of the scale, ive always found buckteeth super adorable. Like, cmon little beaver creature, let’s find you a piece of wood to chew on and cuddle
“wood”
“chew”
Don’t recommend that line of thought unless you enjoy your weenie being chewed off.
maybe just chewed on
I discovered this about myself fairly recently, but I’m never really attracted to a woman unless I’m also at least a little bit scared of her.
“Where’s the baby!?”
“Gone. Reduced to atoms.”
Still kinda wild to me that our preservation instincts can be overridden by something that doesn’t resemble a human in any way outside of a few features.
It’s because they evolved to hack our brains, and our brains evolved to be hacked by their smells / sounds / features. ‘Natural selection for reproductive fitness’ is a harsh mistress.
“Wheres the baby!?”
Shrugs… and walks away.
The Sims guide to parenting
To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.
It wouldn’t take any evolutionary change to notice your offspring look nothing like you especially if they were completely different colors and had drastically different features.
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bears… are cute? 🤨
Also, I’m pretty sure my cat cannot eat me.
I always remind my cat “btw, I’m bigger than you, you can’t eat me you know” just in case she gets hungry.
Lions and Tigers are cats.
My 170lbs dog could eat me if he decided to. He would get less cuddles then so he has high incentive not to
That’s cute and all, but it’s a far different thing to see one up close and personal, and trailing a couple of cubs. Like I did last week.
From behind a lens? Adorable and majestic, frankly!
Scary! But a baby bear is cute. Because of mammal instincts to take care of baby
Oh my God I once saw a black bear get stressed out after wandering into the neighborhood. Truly had no idea what to do about all the people other than climb and try to hide in a tree that it then got stuck in.
Eventually it was tranqued and they caught it fireman style with a tarp held underneath it as it slipped out of the tree.
I’d probably have a less cute story if it was a Polar, Grizzly or Kodiak bear though.
