“Deer raised by another animal to be a carnivorous hunter” would make a great fictional story though. Kind of like Lambert the Sheepish Lion in reverse.
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There’s a theory that some of the cute features are natural side products of breeding animals to be more docile. For instance ear cartilage comes from the embryonic neural crest, same as the adrenal glands – so in selecting for mutations that affect the one you are also selecting for mutations that affect both. And so we got floppy ears in lots of dogs, as well as lop rabbits.
I’m not sure most people would call baby pigeons cute…but then their main goal is to get the parents to throw up. 
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As I started reading this thread I took a side trip to try and find an ad from the '90’s that showed a distinctly unattractive frog. The gist of the text was, “He’s not cute but he’s ecologically important,” followed by a statement about how it’s not just aesthetically appealing species that are valuable.
It made an impact on me but it’s not surprising that campaign didn’t last long and that I can’t find it now.
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Yoinking that! Best pheasant nickname ever.
True (and funny). But even baby birds do have oversized eyes and proportionately tiny beaks usually. Could be a sort of pattern recognition, like it reads more strikingly as a young (and helpless) face?
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Might be the Titicaca Frog? They are notoriously ugly but important p.
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It might have been! This picture looks like the one I remember being in the ad. And I have to admit that in my opinion they are cute, but I’m weird.
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We’re both well north of 50. No risk there. 
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from Rebecca Giggs Fathoms: The World in the Whale
Neurologists have discovered there is a specific part of the human brain dedicated to the identification and classification of other animals. This animal “light bulb” is in a part of the temporal lobe called the superior temporal sulcus, a ridge that runs along the side of the brain. Perceiving living things, and imagining living things when their names are spoken to us (or even when we read those names), sends flares of electrical activity through tiny tracts in this zone. So when I write—and you read—whale: there’s a shared zap in that part of our brains. Again: dolphin. Then jug—a different part of the brain fires. People who have suffered neurological injuries to the animal-recognition section of their brain sometimes cease to be able to identify animals and begin confusing them with objects. This is of particular concern when it comes to mealtimes; such patients routinely fail to distinguish between the edible and the inedible, having lost the ability to tell organic matter from inorganic.
E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis holds that humans automatically identify with the living world and lifelike processes in all their various permutations but that this simpatico feeling can be upgraded through venturing into nature and learning more about it. Biophilia is the “quiet passion [that] burns, not for total control, but for the sensation of constant advance,” Wilson writes. The overtone of conquest here I’ve read with unease, recalling, too, John Berger’s idea that “what we know about [animals] is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.” Both Wilson and Berger see nature’s mystery as compelling, though that mystery leads the two thinkers in opposite directions. For Wilson, education in science and natural history provokes humility: faced with nature’s enduring mystery, humans feel a duty to preserve wild places. For Berger, our knowledge of nature proves human superiority, and calls attention to the distance between us and animals—so we are led to diminish and coddle nature, creating zoos, for instance, in which animals live unnatural lives.
Our attachments to other animal species are frequently contradictory, and are produced in the interplay between closeness and distance: physically, biologically, and metaphorically. But it is not true, ultimately—is it?—that all forms of animate life attract the same level of affection. Biophilia suffers from the biologist’s overly generous belief that every organism is universally interesting, when, in fact, some organisms feature recurrently in human stories and a handful are persistently more cherished than others. What the onlookers felt, seeing the humpback suffering on the sand in Perth, was not just different in degree to witnessing, say, the death of a coral larvae: it was different in quality. I’m talking of magnetism, of charisma. The extent to which people perform feelings of affection and protectiveness toward other animals is not evenly distributed. Environmental campaigners refer instead to “charisma”—a species’ capacity to function as a mascot, to sustain a riveting narrative, and to motivate a crowd to action. Such charismatic animals are readily “anthropomorphized.” That is, they are personified: assigned human characteristics and assumed to demonstrate humanoid behaviors, or values. Charisma establishes a hierarchy. Charismatic species are those that especially arouse compassion, so charisma influences the types of animals thought to warrant protection. Frequently featured by collecting institutions—museums and galleries—as taxidermy and skeletons, in sculptures and paintings, charismatic animals also commonly appear as logos and playthings. They need not be endangered, but as ambassadors for their kin, and for the environments they inhabit, charismatic animals are often exhibited in captivity, and feature as dramatis personae on television (e.g., Flipper). To belong to a charismatic species is to be a pack animal for human imagination. A handful of individual animals can also become independently charismatic—either because these animals are uniquely storied and identifiable in the wild, or because, being held in captivity, people develop a close relationship with them. Off the east coast of Australia, an albino humpback called Migaloo, first spotted in 1991, is recognition section of their brain sometimes cease to be able to identify animals and begin confusing them with objects. This is of particular concern when it comes to mealtimes; such patients routinely fail to distinguish between the edible and the inedible, having lost the ability to tell organic matter from inorganic. E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis holds that humans automatically identify with the living world and lifelike processes in all their various permutations but that this simpatico feeling can be upgraded through venturing into nature and learning more about it. Biophilia is the “quiet passion [that] burns, not for total control, but for the sensation of constant advance,” Wilson writes. The overtone of conquest here I’ve read with unease, recalling, too, John Berger’s idea that “what we know about [animals] is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.” Both Wilson and Berger see nature’s mystery as compelling, though that mystery leads the two thinkers in opposite directions. For Wilson, education in science and natural history provokes humility: faced with nature’s enduring mystery, humans feel a duty to preserve wild places. For Berger, our knowledge of nature proves human superiority, and calls attention to the distance between us and animals—so we are led to diminish and coddle nature, creating zoos, for instance, in which animals live unnatural lives. Our attachments to other animal species are frequently contradictory, and are produced in the interplay between closeness and distance: physically, biologically, and metaphorically. But it is not true, ultimately—is it?—that all forms of animate life attract the same level of affection. Biophilia suffers from the biologist’s overly generous belief that every organism is universally interesting, when, in fact, some organisms feature recurrently in human stories and a handful are persistently more cherished than others. What the onlookers felt, seeing the humpback suffering on the sand in Perth, was not just different in degree to witnessing, say, the death of a coral larvae: it was different in quality.
I’m talking of magnetism, of charisma. The extent to which people perform feelings of affection and protectiveness toward other animals is not evenly distributed. Environmental campaigners refer instead to “charisma”—a species’ capacity to function as a mascot, to sustain a riveting narrative, and to motivate a crowd to action. Such charismatic animals are readily “anthropomorphized.” That is, they are personified: assigned human characteristics and assumed to demonstrate humanoid behaviors, or values. Charisma establishes a hierarchy. Charismatic species are those that especially arouse compassion, so charisma influences the types of animals thought to warrant protection. Frequently featured by collecting institutions—museums and galleries—as taxidermy and skeletons, in sculptures and paintings, charismatic animals also commonly appear as logos and playthings. They need not be endangered, but as ambassadors for their kin, and for the environments they inhabit, charismatic animals are often exhibited in captivity, and feature as dramatis personae on television (e.g., Flipper). To belong to a charismatic species is to be a pack animal for human imagination. A handful of individual animals can also become independently charismatic—either because these animals are uniquely storied and identifiable in the wild, or because, being held in captivity, people develop a close relationship with them.
Off the east coast of Australia, an albino humpback called Migaloo, first spotted in 1991, is considered an exceptional spectacle. During its migration each year, the famous whale is logged up and down the seaboard by social media accounts recording its appearances. Migaloo is one of a select number of animals to be identified, as an individual, under Australian law. Legislation ensconces the whale in a “do not approach” zone a third of a mile wide—an expansion of the standard vessel exclusions in place for all whales. Access to the sky above the white whale is also restricted (“it needs our protection, not our attention,” said one scientist, affirming the laws). Prior to the exclusion laws being enacted, Migaloo hit (or was hit by) a trimaran in Hervey Bay, and a scuba diver also attempted to sit on the whale’s back to make a video. Recently, biologists have become concerned that Migaloo may be developing skin cancer in the harsh winter UV, a vulnerability worsened by the animal’s lack of pigmentation. The white whale’s back (a “landscape of snows,” as Herman Melville had it) is riven with pinkening marks, cysts, and scratches, some of which are almost certainly not lesions, caused by the sun, but are striations from synthetic debris that the animal has come into contact with in the past. Though tourists may be kept at a distance today, there remains an inscription of human trespass, an anonymous autograph, on the skin of Migaloo.
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Yup. And if you start trying to explain to someone how important mosquitoes are in a bioscoenosis, you might just as well talk to the hand.
ETA: typo, and one more thing -
That’s a hell lot of things in there which would need unpacking, and a critical discussion. It’s five to midnight, so I keep this short: yes and no, and a hard no on the second question.
While we are, as a species, really quite gullible. However, we - again, as a species - aren’t shallow as such. We can think about our organising principles, and change them.
Caveat emptor: this works both ways, as we are are thus also capable of actually destroying our species, and quite a lot of the rest of the planet. I don’t care to much about our own species, but I’ll try to do my best for the rest of evolution.
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