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We all love animals, I mean why wouldn’t you? They provide great companionship and can do extraordinary things. From flying hundreds of feet above us to creating some of the most majestic dames, we can never really know too much about the animals that live on our planet. A BBC documentary released this year entitled ‘Super cute and special animals’ focuses on some of the animals that truly stand out, those which we find undeniably cute. We usually watch videos of these animals online, in fact kittens are some of the most researched animals on the internet. There’s just something about those big beautiful eyes which makes them so irresistible; this documentary shows how the sweet exterior of animals usually hides their survivor instinct as ‘behind every appealing animal is an incredible story’.

We all have our favourite animals, some of us are struck by the way an animal walks or makes noises but mostly we base our preferences on their looks. Pandas are undeniably one of the cutest animals and the video of a sneezing pandas quickly went viral online not too long ago! One baby panda at a zoo received thousands of visitors racing to meet the cute little new born. The documentary’s very own presenter, Gordon Buchanan goes to meet this tiny panda and remains enchanted by the cuteness of the panda, which doesn’t have the same threatening characteristic as other bear cubs due to her larger round head. Why do pandas have bigger heads? Pandas are carnivores but they don’t actually act like them, in fact thousands of years ago pandas lost their taste for meat and instead opted for bamboo sticks which don’t have that many calories. Polar bears can last for days on a single kill yet due to the low amount of calories in bamboo sticks pandas must eat for approximately 16 hrs a day. As a result, their bodies have coped to deal with this new vegetarian diet, their tummies have aligned to deal with all those splinters and their skulls are enlarged, with thicker and wider bones, to give the panda better bite force compared to a polar bear. The ironic fact is that this massively large bone looks incredibly cute when covered with fur! The mixture of black and white marks seen on a panda makes their eyes look bigger to intimidate other creatures yet humans find this feature incredibly attractive. This is due to our own psychology: humans find the big eyes and baby like head similar to those of a new born human. Therefore, once we take a glance at the adorable pandas our biology kicks in: our nurturing instincts kick start and blood rushes to our brain’s pleasure centre where a flood of dopamine (one of the hormones which is produced when we fall in love) is released. Psychologists tend to call this phenomenon the ‘cute response’ and, due to our own biology, we just can’t help fall in love with these beautiful creatures!

Image: http://www.nouahsark.com/data/images/infocenter/spotlight/panda/china_giant_panda_04.jpg