“Whenever something reminds us of a baby, from puppies to pandas, from a sock puppet to two dots with a curved line below them, it can trigger our cuteness detector,” explains professor Joshua Paul Dale, a specialist in “cute studies” at Tokyo’s Chuo University. What is cuteness? In 1943, the Austrian zoologist and sometime Nazi psychologist (as well as future Nobel laureate) Konrad Lorenz proposed that behaviours that create the appearance of helplessness motivate us to care for our offspring – and that the same visual cues can arouse equally intense emotions when we encounter them in animals, such as kittens, and even in dolls and teddy bears. They are the forerunners for what today has become a globally lucrative craze – from somersaulting pandas on YouTube to Jeff Koons’s balloon-rabbit sculptures – and the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at London’s Somerset House, titled Cute. In order that their human masters wait on them hand and foot, dogs have harnessed, without quite realising it, cuteness. Your cockapoo or pomeranian has soft-pedalled its savagery and made a virtue of its powerlessness, instead: rolling on its back, whimpering plaintively, looking up with big, watery eyes. True, the wolf may once have been an apex predator that ruled over our forests – but today there are none left in Britain.īy contrast, domesticated mutts are thriving, thanks to a survival strategy beyond the wit of wolves. In the fable The Wolf and the Dog, La Fontaine depicted the former as wild and free, the latter as stupid and servile.

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