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’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.
“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.
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.
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”
somewhat more prominent than average canine teeth
this is definitely a “thing”
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.
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.
Sure one at a time, but what about one dozen starving crazed weasels?
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.
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!
This is an evolved trait. Cute babies are less likely to be eaten. Over time, babies become more cute because they were selected for.
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.
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.
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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.
My 170lbs dog could eat me if he decided to. He would get less cuddles then so he has high incentive not to
Lions and Tigers are cats.
Maybe it has something to do with our coevolution with canines? Just speculation on my part.
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.
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.
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
