Why some animals make us say 'Ugh'

A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line ‘lost cat bulletin.’ Open the message and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its ‘Dawn of the Dead’ digging claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive feelers looking like fresh bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder.

“I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered one respondent. Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a “Photoshop project gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.”

We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish, octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.

Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a web browser — that, to the contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the nostrils accompanied by a guttural or adenoidal vocalisation: ugh, yuck, ew.

Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

Among the all-star uglies are the star-nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the MIT, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away. The blobfish, by contrast, is practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.

Aversion

“It looks like if you handled it,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.”

We have the male proboscis monkey and the male elephant seal, with their pendulous, vaguely salacious Jimmy Durantes, and the woolly bat and the vampire bat, their squashed snub noses accentuating their razor-toothed gapes. The warthog’s trapezoidal skull is straight out of Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ while the warthog’s kin, the babirusa, gives new meaning to the word skulduggery: On occasion, one of its two pairs of curving tusks will grow up and around and pierce right into its skull.

Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.

As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomise and anthropomorphise that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.

Conservation researchers argue that only by being aware of our aesthetic prejudices can we set them aside when deciding which species cry out to be studied and saved.

Reporting recently in the journal ‘Conservation Biology’, Morgan J Trimble, a research fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and her colleagues examined the scientific literature for roughly 2,000 animal species in southern Africa, and uncovered evidence that scientists, like the rest of us, may be biased toward the beefcakes and beauty queens.

Assessing the publication database for the years 1994 through 2008, the researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.

“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” Morgan said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”

Or little cute things. Humans and other mammals seem to have an innate baby schema, an attraction to infant cues like large, wide-set eyes, a button nose and a mouth set low in the face, and the universality of these cues explains why mother dogs have been known to nurse kittens, lionesses to take care of antelope kids.

On a first pass, then, “ugliness would be the deviation from these qualities,” said David Perrett, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Tiny, close-set eyes, prominent snout, no forehead to speak of: it sure sounds like a pig.
The more readily we can analogise between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.” You can keep your rhinoplasty, though: the male monkey’s bulbous proboscis lends his mating vocalisations resonant oomph.

Asymmetry

People are also keenly, even obsessively vigilant for signs of ill health in others. “That means anything that looks seriously asymmetrical when it should be symmetrical, that looks rough and irregular when it should be smooth, that looks like there might be parasites on the skin or worms under the skin, jaundice or pallor,” Dr Miller said. “Anything mottled is considered unattractive. Patchy hair is considered unattractive.” We distinguish between the signs of an acquired illness and those of an innate abnormality. Splotches, bumps and greasy verdigris skin mean “possibly infectious illness,” while asymmetry and exaggerated, stunted or incomplete features hint of a congenital problem.

If we can’t help staring, well, life is nasty and brutish, but maybe a good gander at the troubles of others will keep it from being too short. “Deformities provide a lot of information about what can go wrong, and by contrast what good function is,” Miller said. “This is not just about physical deformities. People who seem crazy are also highly attention-grabbing.”

The appeal of ugly animals is that neither they nor their mothers will care if you stare, and if you own a pet that others find shocking or ugly, you probably won’t mind if others stare, too.

Joan Miller, vice president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association Inc, said she found the hairless Sphynx cat, with its ‘huge ears’ and only “a minor amount of wrinkling,” to be “absolutely marvellous looking” and “strong as an ox,” although she conceded it sometimes needed to wear a sweater.

Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.