Pictures of Baby Pet Animals

Everyone loves pictures of baby animals. In many veterinary clinics and animal hospitals you will find cork boards full of client provided dog and cat pictures. If you don’t like baby animals you probably have no soul. They evoke the same kind of reaction in people that pictures of baby humans do, except to a much greater degree, and the gap between human and animal cuteness increases drastically as humans get older. For some reason, an animal can perform the most mundane action and it becomes cute. Imagine that you were looking at a picture of a group of people sleeping. You’d raise an eyebrow and wonder why someone thought this would make good photo subject material. But look at pictures of baby animals sleeping and suddenly it becomes the most adorable thing ever.

Because of this, people post up archives of baby animal photos or they even dedicate whole blogs like Cute Overload to posting and fawning over pictures of baby animals and miscellaneous animal cuteness: puppies, kittens, chicks, hamsters, etc. They even feature baby animals that don’t normally come to mind as being cute, such as baby snakes, snails and turtles that are basically smaller versions of themselves as adult. Actually, when you think about it almost anything becomes cuter when it’s miniature.

What exactly is it about pictures of baby animals, and animals in general, that so appeal to the masses? We can read about accidents and murders in the newspaper and barely bat an eye, but throw a dog into traffic and it becomes a national tragedy that’s covered in the media for days, drawing sympathy as they flash and print the picture of poor Leo before his cruel and untimely end. Humans don’t get this kind of sympathy or attention unless they’re celebrities. It’s almost as if being an animal already grants you celebrity or some sort of elevated status.

But ironically, humans have also subjected animals to unusual cruelty and punishment. Animals have been hunted to feed us, line our coats, scent our perfumes and many other purposes. They’ve been used extensively as test subjects for countless experiments. Animal abuse is a common enough phenomenon that there’s a police force dedicated to apprehending animal abusers. Why do we mistreat the very creatures that we practically worship at times, and actually did in the olden days?

To be fair, animals aren’t venerated as a whole. You usually won’t see ants and nematodes getting the same amount of love that dogs and cats do. Neither does everyone venerate animals, but it’s difficult not to find baby animal pictures endearing. One must remember, however, that they are an idealistic representation of animal life that is inconsistent with many of our real life interactions with them.