As Sydney Brownstone's story "Hey Seattleites, Stop Trying to 'Save' Seal Pups" explains, humans have a powerful weakness for the eyes and general cuteness of seal pups. This attraction is all the more crippling when the seal appears to have been abandoned on some beach. It's sitting there all alone in the world. The human feels the pull to protect this poor little thing. How could you not save those eyes?

In some cases, the pup is taken home, placed in a warm bathtub, feed Gatorade, and soon killed. It turns out that human kindness was the very last thing that the pup needed. It was never abandoned in the first place; it was simply waiting for its mother, who was out hunting for fish and other creatures of the sea.

Yes, humans are stupid when it comes to wild animals, but in the case of these baby seals, it's not entirely fair to place the blame on our cluelessness. A part of the problem is in fact built into our genes and the genes of other animals. There is an evolutionary reason why those pups are cute and why humans find things like big eyes, puffy cheeks, and large heads irresistible. The great sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy devotes a whole chapter in her book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding to this subject: "Babies as Sensory Traps."

Hrdy writes:

A real-life lioness in north Kenya nicknamed Kamuniak adopted... first one, then another, and another—five in all—baby antelopes. One fawn, alas, the lioness did eventually eat.

The other fawns died like the pups stuck in human bathtubs—meaning, a lioness knows as much about raising an antelope as a human does about raising a seal. But Hrdy argues that this kind of thing—one animal adopting or succumbing to the cuteness of a baby from another species—is widespread in nature. And the evolutionary explanation for it is this: Babies whose mothers over-responded to their visual and vocal signals were, genetically speaking, more favored for survival than those whose mothers responded mildly or not at all (their pups or fawns did not survive). There is then a kind of surplus of maternal care in nature.

And so, we have indiscriminate mothering on one side, and the sensory traps of babies on the other. To explain the second part of this relationship, Hrdy points to the work of Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who identified a "suite of traits contributing to the perception of infants as adorable." These traits, which he called kindchenschema, are the bread and butter of Disney. So, the seal pups of West Seattle are victims not only of "misplaced maternal largesse" but also of the sensory traps that they themselves are.

But animals are never locked in a prison of instincts. They are always changing in response to changes in their immediate environment. For example, I was informed by a young and very knowledgable park employee in Everett, Washington, that the seal mothers of that fine city had actually stopped placing their babies on the beaches and were now in the habit of leaving them on log booms, which were safe from the surplus of human kindness.