Blessed are the cute for they shall be saved

We love to face it. I mean literally, we face it – humans and everything else. We like pretty faces and over-all appearances of beings. That is how celebrity power is fueled: by popularity. Whether we find them stunningly beautiful or adorably cute, they account for the bell curve on what we think are handsome creatures.

The thing is, humans, to a much a larger extent than ever before in history, determine the fate of the planet and all other creatures. So this tendency of ours to latch on to what is beautiful may just be harming our efforts to understand and protect our planet since “beauty” is not necessarily key to importance or usefulness in the web of life.   

If you see a massacre of whales, most of us would flinch. But what if you knew that the purple pig-nosed frog is disappearing and along with it, its role in the web of life, would you get as emotionally charged to mobilize opinion and efforts to save it?

If you would, then you should meet the rest of your rarity – the members and supporters of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society whose slogan says “we can’t all be pandas.” I just love these humans, especially its founder, Simon Watt who, with a straight face admitted, that his personal favorite ugly is the Blue grey taildropper slug – a creature who when it feels threatened, will simply leave its behind (its butt!) behind for the predator to get busy with, giving the slug time (and slugs need time) to get away. And talk about “ugly” that also scared me was the Greater adjutant – humongous birds that thrive on landfills.  Even these hardy birds have been pushed to the surviving margins by urban humans!

But if this is now making you think, then you share the state of mind of researchers who did a search for the “ugly” (or “aesthetically challenged”, as they put it) mammals in Australia in scientific papers and did not find them in numbers as they did the cute and the beautiful or even the “bad”.  Their paper was entitled “The good, the bad and the ugly; which Australian terrestrial mammal attracts the most research?”

Australia, like other islands, by nature of their geography, has given rise to creatures that could only be found in Australia (the term for this is “endemism”). And mammals, given that humans are mammals themselves, no surprise here, are usual favorite subjects of studies.  

Mammals occupy a large percentage if not overwhelm the scientific literature. So after searching for over 14,000 papers on Australian mammals, the results of the “ugly” study revealed that 77% of studies were on the “cute” mammals – monotremes like the strangely cute platypus (there are only 5 living species of monotremes left: the duckbilled platypus and the 4 are anteater species) and marsupials like the kangaroo. And you’d be surprised that even the “bad” received more attention than the “good”. The “bad” mammals are those that are not native to Australia and they got there because they were introduced to Australia. Because of the generally harmful impact of invasive creatures, they attract more studies than the “ugly” looking ones who have generally been around for a loner time there like rodents and bats.

There is nothing wrong with liking what is cute and beautiful but there is certainly something wrong if that is our only criteria for choosing what creature to save. If we select whom to protect according to how much they appeal to our sense of beauty or how human they seem in terms of the way they behave, then we betray what really defines humans – which is that we can understand and transcend our own impulses, if they do not help us move forward. And saving only cute species, while bankable in show business, is neither useful, nor effective. And geez, it’s not even an intelligent strategy in recognizing the touchstone of nature: diversity.  

But science-based conservation organizations know this. While they choose certain animals as their symbols, they know that it is more important to save and restore habitats – the environments where the connections between and among all kinds of organisms – not just animals- thrive. Saving these special places is like helping schools versus just one student.

Blessed are those then who go beyond the cute, for they will be the ones who will pass on an inheritable Earth. – Rappler.com