Woolly Mice and the Ethics of Cutewashing

Since 2021, biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has attempted to “de-extinct” a handful of extinct animals through genome editing, including the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and, most notably, the woolly mammoth. The company claims that creating new members of these species and reintroducing them to their ancestors’ habitats would help counteract a loss of biodiversity resulting from an increasingly larger number of animal species disappearing every year. The company also claims that the technology developed along the way could help contribute to animal conservation efforts more broadly.

While their goals are lofty, ethical concerns have been raised over Colossal’s projects (some of which I wrote about a few years ago when they first made headlines). For example, one such concern has to do with the allocation of resources: it’s costly and time-consuming to attempt to bring woolly mammoths and other extinct species back to life, and those resources could arguably be better spent protecting species that already exist and are at risk of extinction. Others have expressed concerns about the environmental impact of reintroducing megafauna like mammoths into the wild, especially given the changes that have occurred since they went extinct. Then there is the worry that Colossal Biosciences scientists are messing around with forces that they don’t fully understand or appreciate, and that there could be unforeseen consequences with de-extinction in general.

Although it is debatable how much progress Colossal Biosciences has made in its woolly mammoth project, what they have done is biohacked something undeniably cute along the way: the woolly mouse.

The woolly mouse is the product of taking a regular mouse and splicing its genes with some of those that make the woolly mammoth able to withstand cold temperatures as well as those that make it, well, woolly. The result is a creature that looks like a mouse that might run around an anachronistic caveman house in a cartoon, and has been met with near-universal proclamations of adoration in the news and heart-eye emojis online.

According to Colossal’s cofounder Ben Lamm, “Adorability was one of the unintended consequences that we did not expect.” Intentional or not, it seems to have served as a distraction from those concerns mentioned above. By creating the woolly mouse, Colossal may then be engaged in what we can call cutewashing: creating a distraction from some moral concerns by creating something very cute.

Regardless of its cuteness, the woolly mouse also raises moral problems. We again might be concerned that resources could be better allocated to help preserve existing species: why create a woolly mouse when you could instead attempt to save, for example, the black rhinoceros, pangolin, vaquita, or other critically endangered animals? The woolly mouse also provides no benefit in terms of filling ecological niches, as it was not an animal at all until only recently, and so it is difficult to justify its existence on the grounds of reestablishing lost biodiversity.

Of course, the woolly mouse was not the end goal, but merely a step along the way in Colossal’s larger project. The company has also stated that they do not intend to sell the animal as a pet – although researchers can request them – so there is little risk of them harming the environment. Regardless, we may feel less inclined to be critical of Colossal’s work precisely because they have created something so adorable.

The degree to which a genetically engineered animal is cute should presumably not be a relevant factor when weighing moral considerations around its existence or the actions that led to its creation. But the cuteness of the woolly mouse reminds us that our moral judgments are often intertwined with our affective judgments; in other words, whether we think something is morally wrong or acceptable is often tied up with how we feel about it.

The relationship between our affective judgments and our moral judgments has long been studied by philosophers and psychologists. For example, much has been written on how feelings of disgust influence our judgments that something is morally wrong. One long-established finding is that while many people have no negative reaction to the thought of eating meat, most will feel disgusted by the idea of eating a dead animal if it was their beloved pet. One’s feeling of disgust correlates with a judgment that eating a dead pet is morally wrong, even if one does not judge it immoral to eat other animals. While it’s up for debate how, exactly, feelings of disgust are related to moral approbation, by and large, we tend to judge actions more harshly when we feel disgusted.

The feeling we get when seeing something cute is close to the opposite of disgust, and fittingly seems to have the opposite effect on our moral judgments. That we find things cute at all is hypothesized to be a product of evolution that made sure we protected our offspring – hence why we find babies cute, and why we typically find things that are proportioned in the way that babies are cute, as well. Some researchers have also proposed that our reaction to cute things – the “cuteness response” – has the effect of expanding our “moral circle” around the thing we deem cute. In other words, when we think that something is cute, it is something that we are likely to think is worthy of moral concern.

The cuteness of the woolly mouse may affect our moral judgments insofar as we see it as something with moral worth that is deserving of protection. It is difficult to shake this feeling: the woolly mouse is almost unbearably cute and, if you’re like me, your immediate instinct is that it needs to be protected at all costs. Here, however, is where the risk of cutewashing is most significant: it is easy to overlook some of the more morally questionable acts that are going on behind the scenes if our affective judgments make us less likely to apply strict moral scrutiny.

Of course, a woolly mouse is not a woolly mammoth, and Colossal Biosciences may never actually succeed in bringing the mammoth back to life. If they do, however, we shouldn’t get distracted if it ends up being adorable.