Babies and Bunnies

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

When Alicorn compares babies and bunnies, she finds the bunnies much cuter, which puzzles her:

Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture. In fact, bunnies are edible. By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be “mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit”.

She and all the commenters seem to be missing the obvious evo-psych explanation — probably because they’ve grown up in the suburbs, with zero exposure to farming or ranching.

We’re a race of hunter-gatherers who evolved into pastoralists and farmers. We instinctively take care of cute little animals — until they grow up and turn not-cute. Then, suddenly, they become edible. It’s almost as if we instinctively raise animals for food…

Edit: Apparently Alicorn is upset that I did not recognize her feminine nature by her user name, which is the technical term for a unicorn’s horn. I’ve since replaced neutral masculine pronouns with explicitly feminine ones. (I can be reached, by the way, at isegoria at this domain — which is a .net domain.)

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