Animal attraction

EVER WONDERED WHY SUDDENLY YOU’RE SEEING LLAMAS ON EVERY ITEM OF KIDS' CLOTHING, OR WHY YOU CAN’T GET THROUGH THE SHOPS WITHOUT ENCOUNTERING A SLOTH? EXPLORING THE ANIMALS OF THE MOMENT CAN SAY A LOT ABOUT US, TOO

Humans’ fascination with animals has long been documented, from the first cave drawings of bison in France, to the worship of cats in Ancient Egypt, to Native American spirit animal beliefs. While it’s easy to imagine how, for example, domesticated bulls earned their 15 minutes of fame in Ancient Greece, it’s more intriguing to examine why today we might obsess over a species we have never even encountered in real life. Affection for certain animals was doubtless once saved only for species that could be found locally, that played a role in people’s daily lives. How, then, did we go from that to modern

Western society where a child living in Leeds might name a llama as their favourite animal? Now that we have access to knowledge of the millions of species living all over the world, just what exactly governs which creature gets to have their moment in the spotlight?

WE ARE ALL ANIMALS

First, it’s useful to understand some of the psychological factors that draw us to animals, even those that don’t live in our immediate environment. These fall into three main categories; solidarity with animals (our desire to help them), human-animal similarity and animal pride, where we connect as part of the animal kingdom ourselves. But what makes humans really fall for an animal, so much that they want its image on their clothes, in their homes, even tattooed on their bodies?

Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz suggested that all young animals have similar features that endear them to us; big eyes, large heads, rounder bodies. Our desire to nurture picks up on baby-like behaviour, too, and we know that witnessing this actually affects the part of our brains associated with reward. With more people remaining child-free, due to a myriad of factors, ranging from the economic to the environmental (a recent US survey found a fifth of respondents said that they didn’t want children), perhaps it’s understandable that we’re more into animals than ever, whether they’re just our pets, or perhaps the latest video that we’ve watched online.

GOOD, BAD AND THE UGLY

But what affects a certain animal’s specific rise to fame? Dayna Isom Johnson, a trend expert for the online marketplace Etsy, told Oprah Daily that they’ve noticed shift from a fascination with mythical creatures such as unicorns and mermaids to the likes of “llamas, sloths, and jungle-dwellers.” This switch in affections seems to have happened for a number of reasons. The rise in popularity of llamas, for example, seems to be tracked back to a hugely successful children’s book: Llama Llama Red Pajama

by Anna Dewdney, which then went on to get its own television show.

Then there are the animals on whom we project desirable human qualities. According to The Wall Street Journal, the sloth’s slow but steady rise to fame came from it being an ideal animal “for a world that’s more frantic than ever … an animal that appears to do absolutely nothing.” Similarly, videos of the giant rodent species capybaras steaming in hot springs have also gone viral; this peaceful, chilled-out attitude endearing them to us.

In a surprising departure from previous attitudes to animals traditionally considered ‘pests,’ even the fox is all over T-shirts on Etsy, the poster-animals for the under-dog, anarchic creatures raiding our rubbish and living their best lives without a care. They might steal chickens and rifle through our bins, but we can’t help finding them fascinating and even cute – perhaps due to the novelty of proximity to wildlife in our largely urban habitat.

But this lens for looking at the animal kingdom can be harmful. The Ugly Animal Preservation Society celebrates the creatures that don't meet our normal ‘cuteness’ criteria, with their slogan ‘We can't all be pandas’, and PETA also campaigns against ‘speciesism’, whereby people allocate greater value to some species than others. A case in point when you consider that in the Western world, we are shocked by countries that eat dogs, and yet we continue to eat other animals as though those species are less worthy of our protection. Leading conservation charity WWF is also trying to promote care for the species that so frequently get bad press; sharks, wolves, snakes and spiders feature in a new Dreamworks animated film The Bad Guys, and can be symbolically adopted through the WWF website (wwf.org.uk).

Technological advances in documentary making mean that today kids can obsess over fantastic creatures like the angler fish, which while it meets none of the cuteness criteria, does offer fascination based purely on how weird and wonderful it is.

With the whole animal kingdom ready for us to explore, it’s difficult to know which species will claim the spotlight next; but red pandas seem a likely bet, as do the charming quokkas, a sort of miniature wallaby, known for being the happiest animals in the world. Let’s face it, that’s definitely the kind of spirit we could do with right now.

"They steal chickens and rifle through bins, but we still find foxes cute"