A long time in a youth far away, I discovered (boom boom boom boom) – Cutepower! Awesomeness. If I turned my head just so, flashed my eyes like that, smiled, well, my cheekbones would do the rest and I could have my way with pretty well anyone. (My family has good cheekbones. Many people comment on it. Really. They do.)

Then I grew breasts. And I found out that a critical part of that cuteness factor was to add a thrust up set of them. People gave me credit for my ideas, they listened to me speak, they held out chairs for me, with only the addition of a push-up bra and maybe some lipstick to the cheekbone assemblage.

Now of course, I’m older, rounder, greyer. Used to dye my hair, too lazy now. Hate the feeling of lipstick on my lips but apply it every once and awhile, still do the magic lift up bras when needed. Still try the eye/cheekbone thing. I have to.

Because, once your cute is gone, well, it’s all downhill from there.

Look at baby seals. More abundant than the fish they eat, we daren’t pluck them off the ice floes solely because of their big brown watery sad eyes. They are overbreeding. They are starving people and fish and other animals. No matter. They’re CUTE.

I read today in the CH that in Canmore, Alberta, the rabbits have become a pestilence. They have been wildly reproducing since the 1990’s and apparently there’s one for every 6 Canmorians. Kill them? No way. They’re CUTE. So they’ve been taken into animal sanctuaries (where no doubt they’ve been adopted and then escaped to breed again) until there was no more room for them, and now the animal control people are visibly shrinking from euthanizing them.

Meanwhile, arguably less cute rats have taken over the Galapagos. 180 million of them, in fact. Now I like rats, sort of. My daughter had one as a pet and she was sweet. Little Aretha, we called her, black as Aretha Franklin, with white jazz paws. My daughter was big on Aretha Franklin at the time, so it was meant as homage. (Our babysitter Sarah thought it was homage that they named a hamster after her, too, until it turned out the hamster was pregnant and gave birth and then ate her babies) Rats make great, smart, trainable pets and if you’re really good you can do a Willard thing and take over the world.

Which is apparently what happened on the Galapagos. Even I have to admit that 180 million rats doth make my skin crawl. So, rather than letting life forces deal with it, did the scientists rehouse the little nippers? Did they take them to a rat sanctuary, run adoption campaigns, set them up for life?

Nope.

They are dive bombing the island with rat poison.

After they clear off the cuter animals, that is. And the iguanas. (Sorry, not cute). Then, presumably, some poor environmental engineering intern is going to have to go there and pick up the tons of rat bodies. I’ll just bet they won’t pick the CUTE intern to do that job. Nah, they’ll pick the intern they don’t like because she has a squinty eye or frizzy hair or he’s heavyset or something.

Dime will get you dollars the intern won’t be blonde. Or have nice cheekbones. But I digress.

But you see the difference? Have a fluffy tail and floppy ears and you get cherished until you eat everyone out of house and home. Have little ears, a hairless tail, and the cleverness of a rat, and they’ll kill you right as rain. But these are both rodents, people. Of the same branch of the biological tree.

They even are on par for disease carrying potential, and a lot of folks are allergic to rabbits. One could argue it’s better to kill the bunnies because they can be made into stews that are acceptable to eat in many countries, unlike rat stew, which only appears on Fear Factor.

Its just plain animal hypocrisy, that’s what it is,

And as someone whose cuteness is waning, it makes me pretty darn nervous.