How cute animals came to control our minds

Perhaps there are good reasons why we project our feelings on to the cuddly through social media

In the decade before my husband and I reproduced, the most maddening thing my mother ever said to me was: “Of course, your cat’s your baby.”

I replied tartly I knew the difference between a pet and a child and that, while I was fond of my giant red Maine Coon, I doubted my entire world would end if harm came his way.

I didn’t have framed photos of my cat on my piano and when I said he was intelligent, I didn’t mean he could beat me at chess. I have always dreaded becoming one of those crazy old cat ladies who won’t go on holiday in case their beloved feline “sulks”.

Even so, I was being more than a bit disingenuous. There was the Christmas when I felt slighted when my mother suggested the cat could reside in her garage when we came to stay. “But he’ll be lonely,” I protested, before pointing out she wouldn’t dream of putting one of her grandchildren in a windowless lock-up.

In other words, I was as guilty of anthropomorphism as any other standard-issue Brit – and for the same reasons. I’m talking about the burning need to project my own emotions and insecurities on to my furry, fourlegged friend. It was easier to talk about the cat’s feelings than to admit to a passing jealous fear that my mother favoured my parenting siblings over the (then) childless me.

Social media have ramped up the tendency to use animals as portals to channel complex feelings and make some sort of coherence of them. When we weep at a film of a dead puppy, we grieve for what we can’t express about human misery: the apocalyptic footage from war zones where man’s inhumanity to man leaves us blank with incomprehension.

This raging battle between sentiment and reason continues to this day. When I saw friends sharing photos on Facebook this week of Larry the Downing Street cat toying with a mouse, I harrumphed at their soppiness, before finding my hand had a will of its own and was already clicking the pic to discover the mouse’s fate (spoiler alert: it escaped).

A quick flick through most Instagram feeds would suggest around 90 per cent of adult Britons have their brains controlled by an evil kitten at David Attenborough’s HQ in an extinct volcano. I am one of them. When I first embarked on Facebook I made a solemn vow that I would ban cute animal photos – and the word cute – from my posts. Then I glimpsed the popular video of a floating sea otter cradling her pup in a vision of cuteness so nuclear strength, you’d have to be Vulcan not to assign her maternal feelings.

The tougher you are, the harder you fall. A business guru in his fifties posted a Facebook link yesterday entitled “This guy photoshops his dog into a giant in all his pics and it’s hilarious.” My friend had added: “This is genius,” which seemed a tall claim for a pumped-up goldendoodle (a hybrid of a golden retriever and a poodle) in the age of artificial intelligence and space travel. You might imagine the Budget never happened and the terrorists had declared a global ceasefire.

My conflicting emotions appear typical of middle-aged Brits who have been raised in the country. It’s not our fault. We spent our formative years being trained to wolf down offal and equate vegetarian with care in the community. Rabbits were fair game for anyone with a .22 rifle, while sweet piglets would end up on the plate. Being mawkish about animals was pretty much the eighth deadly sin.

Even so, the family dog was deemed to be somewhere below God and above your father in the general pecking order; if he wanted the sofa, everyone else sat on the floor. If your mother owned a horse, everyone and everything else was dead to her. No wonder so many of my ilk feel torn in two when faced with a Twittersphere fuelled by worship of cuddly critters.

The consoling news is that animal behavioural experts are publishing new research that suggests we’re not bonkers when we assign feelings and motives to creatures.

Last year, Thomas Bugnyar, a professor at the University of Vienna, demonstrated ravens can imagine being spied on by competitors while hiding food and will adapt their behaviour accordingly – the kind of thought process that was believed previously to be the exclusive province of humans.

Just as fascinating are the many clips of primates in scenes of apparent “mourning”. Take this week’s footage of Noel the chimpanzee attending to the corpse of a male chimp, whom she had looked after since his mother’s death. Noel was observed tenderly cleaning his teeth with stems of grass and sitting by his side for a lengthy period of time.

Dr Edwin van Leeuwen of St Andrew’s University was surely understating the case when he observed: “Chimpanzees may form long-lasting social bonds and like humans, may handle corpses in a socially meaningful way.”

It increasingly seems obvious to me that if elephants, whales or dolphins had opposable thumbs, they’d be keeping all of us in safari parks.