https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness https://www.bbcearth.com/news/the-code-for-cuteness
When I was in high school I did a science fair project that involved mice. Honestly it was mostly because my school tried to discourage us from using live subjects and I felt the need to push the boundaries. One of the hoops I had to jump through was to present the proposal to the IRB at a local community college. One of the IRB's requirements was to define the disposition of the mice after the project was complete. I decided to keep them as pets. Those mice lived an additional three years if memory serves, and they were every bit as suitable as pets as hamsters, reptiles, or similar small animals.
The squirrels in my yard are basically outdoor pets - we regularly have a suet cake hung in their trees, and I made a permanent feeder for them that's kept full year-round. Our squirrels are... rotund. The ones I'm watching now are very young, and are the third generation that have lived on our property since we moved in.
In the fall, I hunt squirrels with my daughters. They're small enough that they're consumed in one or two meals so nothing goes to waste, and they're intelligent enough that they're very difficult to hunt effectively. We don't shoot the ones in our yard, though. Those are pets.
We are often protective towards faces that look like our young. It’s hard coded for most creatures. Big eyes, flat side profile and reduction in size of the skulls. Tugging human heart strings means they don’t have to compete for food resources. Domesticated animals also exhibit this with behaviour as well as physical features. Cats..for example.. can be rather aloof ..until they need you. They are absolutely affectionate fur balls.
We don’t play hide and seek..and fetch with adults but we do with children and our pets. They become child substitutes and satisfies a very primal caregiving instinct in humans who may not be able to express it with other humans.
Also..this is why psychopaths start early with torturing and killing animals. It’s an early warning sign to lock these people up and throw the keys away.
You're also more likely to get the parasite from handling raw pork than cats, and indoor cats are entirely unaffected.
I have also seen this in snakes that ‘mesmerize’ mice ..predators know how to paralyze their prey.
But this turned up as more recent and is closer to the Trojan suicide prodding parasite.. https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/s...
I have read the full piece but now it’s not accessible without subscription..
[..] A mouse sniffs the air, catches the whiff of cat urine, and runs towards the source of the smell… and straight into the jaws of a cat. This bizarre suicidal streak is the work of a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which has commandeered the mouse’s brain and turned it into a Trojan rodent—a vehicle for sneaking T.gondii into a cat.[..]
[..] T.gondii (or Toxo for short) infects a wide variety of mammals, but it only completes its life cycle in the guts of a cat. To get there, Toxo has ways of subverting the behaviour of dead-end hosts like mice. Its machinations are subtle, so subtle that it’s normally hard to tell an infected mouse from an uninfected one. But the difference becomes obvious when there’s cat pee in the air. Normal mice, even lab-born ones that have never met a cat, have an innate fear of cat smells. Those infected with Toxo do not. They (and their parasites) are more likely to end up in a cat. Toxo also influences the brain of Wendy Ingram from the University of California at Berkeley. She has long been obsessed with the brain and fascinated by Toxo’s dominion over it. “I was struck by the idea that a single celled parasite ‘knows’ more about our brains than we do,” she says. [..]
