The Many Downsides of the Psychology Behind Babifying Animals
Posted October 9, 2025 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
A very common practice for making nonhuman animals (animals) more appealing or selling various products is to infantilize them by representing them as "cute" big-eyed, round-faced, bobble-headed objects or commodities. In this riveting interview, attorney Taylor Paige Waters discusses her recent writing on this topic and explains why humans have a tendency to infantilize animals, to be drawn to babies, to choose pets who have baby-like looks, and to like social media posts of baby animals far more than those of adults. However, when we frame animals as babies (cute, harmless, dependent), we start to feel entitled to their bodies and attention. The “aww” becomes a permission slip.
Marc Bekoff: How did you get interested in this topic, and how does it relate to your background and general areas of interest?
Taylor Paige Waters: This piece began with a jolt of discomfort and builds upon work I was already doing on the harms of digitally exhibiting animals through platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. I was at an elephant orphanage in Nairobi listening to keepers describe calves who’d lost everything, mothers shot by poachers, families scattered, while tourists smiled for selfies and tried to coax babies closer with branches. That dissonance is the seam I work along as a farmed-animal advocate and an attorney: the gap between what we say we feel about animals and what we actually do to them. My legal work lives inside that gap, scrutinizing claims on packages, challenging systems that turn animals into content or commodities, and asking what genuine care looks like when the audience isn’t watching. The essay sits within a larger thread in my writing on infantilization, spectatorship, and whether animals are entitled to privacy from our gaze.
TPW: Three ideas anchor this ethic. First, “cute” is not neutral. Big eyes, round faces, bobble-headed proportions trigger caretaking impulses and lower our guard. Once an animal is framed as a baby, interference feels like love and access feels like care. That framing travels: It softens wildlife encounters, justifies “hands-on” selfies, and underwrites a pet market that literally breeds infant-like traits into adult dogs at real welfare costs. Second, infantilization does moral and economic work. It’s a modern Bambi effect. The “aww” funnels attention and dollars toward animals who read as adorable and compliant, and away from animals who don’t. Social platforms didn’t invent this; they industrialized it. Algorithmic watch-time teaches us that the most “engaging” animals are the ones we can hold, diaper, bottle-feed, or narrate—over and over, at scale. That visibility normalizes ownership and contact; it becomes an alibi for exploitation. The aesthetics of tenderness can hide profound entitlement.
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