Ugly animals are just as deserving a cause as those cuddly gorillas

What a strange and complicated species we humans are. Relative to our size our brains are bigger than that of any other species – allowing us to communicate, solve problems, and enjoy an awareness of our place in the world that is unique among animals. Yet in the face of the cute and cuddly our famous brains, capable of rational thinking like that of no other species, apparently turn into sentimental mush.

Seemingly every media outlet has been caught up in recent days with the story of Harambe, a western lowland gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo. Harambe is now dead, shot by humans to prevent the possibility of him wittingly – or unwittingly – killing a small boy who had somehow rolled into his enclosure.

Now we can all get hot under the collar about a lack of responsible parenting – “accidents happen” was the boy’s mother’s response – and the rights and wrongs of killing an animal under such circumstances. The subsequent media storm, the vigils held for Harambe and the column inches his death generated proved that many did get very hot under the collar indeed.

But would the response had been the same if the child had rolled to within snapping distance of the jaws of a crocodile? Would seventy thousand people have signed a petition calling for the parents to be prosecuted if the boy had fallen into the coils of a boa constrictor? Would anyone have set up a shrine to a wasp swatted for the crime of simply being a wasp?

My silly sentimental heart would love to feel that we wouldn’t be so narrowminded and prejudiced to only care about an animal that is furry, and warm-blooded and looks a bit like us. But my cynical head tells me that if it had been a stick insect that had perished (the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect has the same conservation status as the Western Lowland Gorilla, incidentally) it would not have ended up trending on Twitter.

Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel-winning ethnologist, noted that “humans feel affection for animals with juvenile features: large eyes, bulging craniums, retreating chins. Small-eyed, long-snouted animals do not elicit the same response.”

And all humans are susceptible – even scientists. A recent study discovered that a bias towards the “cute” has led to more than a hundred published studies on meerkats in the last 20 years and only a handful on the less visually appealing manatee.

The giant panda – used to great effect by the World Wildlife Fund on its logo – has had millions and millions of pounds spent on its conservation. Numbers are gradually increasing as a result – but many argue that all that money could be much better spent protecting a wider range of species that may not be so lovable, but be of greater value to the biodiversity of our planet.

Thankfully, the uglier, less charismatic members of the animal kingdom have a champion. He’s a biologist called Simon Watt and he is president for life of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society and author of The Ugly Animals – We Can’t All Be Pandas. He stands on stage and exhorts his audience to embrace the slimy, the warty and downright hideous. He makes us laugh at naked mole rats and then tells us why the world would be a poorer place without them.

With that in mind, who wants to start a petition to save the Blobfish?