After Cute, Do Not Stop

“So cute” arrives very quickly. It makes people pause, and it also keeps an animal that might otherwise have been swiped past in front of their eyes for a moment. Where attention is expensive, the first glance is no small thing.

The trouble often begins with the next sentence. Someone sees a slow loris being touched and says: “I want one too.” The sentence is not necessarily malicious; it may even be liking spoken too quickly. But the destination has already been imagined: a wild life gently pushed to a place very close to humans.

This is not a problem with one video. The real trouble is that some animals appear so abundant in images that their decline in the wild does not feel like daily experience, but like bad news appended later. After enough images of the same kind have been swiped past, “suitable for closeness” begins to look like common sense. The animals sliding by in short videos, the smiling animals on children’s products, the animals drawn rounder on conservation posters—all are repeatedly completing that step toward closeness on people’s behalf.

It is not that we have failed to see them; sometimes it is precisely that we have seen too many already-processed stand-ins. They have been placed into screen dimensions, children’s-room colors, and the expressions on posters most easily liked; their real rarity arrives late instead, like a supplementary note.

Some rescuers really do need to borrow cuteness to win the first glance. But the harder that glance is to obtain, the less it can be allowed to close off everything that should follow: habitat and boundaries. Cuteness can open the door, but it cannot compress everything outside the door into a face fit for reposting.

“So cute” can remain. After it remains, do not rush to bring that animal back over to the human side. Outside the screen there are still treetops at night; it is there, living a life that does not need to be brought close into our arms.