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Cute Fuzzies

 


What is the best designed animal? Obviously not a legitimate question because one could argue that all species are well designed for the life and habitat where they live. It is also entirely subjective. So, in my entirely subjective and unscientific assessment, I am going to cast my vote for the otter as the best designed animal. Just look at the way they move. They are like self-powered slinkies. They are comfortable on land or water. Cold does not bother them. They are sleek and streamlined. I mean come on. They are just darn cute.

You might think that the soft furry otters would be easy prey for large predators, but they are so well adapted for swimming that if they are near a body of water they can often escape. And they are not faint-hearted. I recently saw a nature program where a group of four otters scared off a large tiger from their watering hole.

I think my affection for otters started with a Disney nature program I saw as a kid. Otters were playing and sliding down snow chutes. They looked like they were having a great time to my child’s mind. I thought to myself, if reincarnation was a thing and I had to come back as an animal, I would pick the otter.

How cute an organism is, has nothing to do with how well designed it is. The warthog, to my admittedly prejudiced eye is about as homely as they come. Yet warthogs seem to be able to carry out all the necessary life functions as well as anyone else. “My admittedly prejudiced eye” is part of the problem. Humans are programmed to find certain things cute and other things ugly. There are variabilities in individual human preferences of course. We don’t all think the same things are cute, nor do we find all the same things ugly. Otherwise, you would never get a biologist who would be willing to study anything other than cute fuzzies. I am glad that there are scientists who study spiders. I can appreciate spiders and what they do for pest control and their place in the environment. They are a marvel of adaptation. Nonetheless . . . they kind of creep me out.  It is a lot easier to find a large group of people who want to save an endangered squirrel that it is to find a large group of people who want to save an endangered scorpion.

Humans tend to have an affinity to furry warm-blooded animals. There are groups of people who call themselves “Furries” who like to dress up in furry animal costumes and do whatever it is they do for entertainment and companionship. It is worth note that even though this may an extreme reaction to fur, and that humans have a group for just about everything under the sun, there are no analogous groups of “Scalies,” or “Exoskeletalies,” or “Slimies” that I know of.

I think we tend to have an affinity for organisms that share some traits with ourselves. We are much more likely to find such organisms “cute.”  No one has ever been able to ask a crab if it found a squirrel or an otter, or a human cute. If they could, I suspect the answer would be no, no, and definitely not! As Rod Serling (and others) have said, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.


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