Lot of hairy and fluffy looking organisms are also dangerous too… like those worms, bears, some plants, etc
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A difficult topic with no clear and certainly no single answer. I’d wager anthropomorphasis has a strong role to play here. A lot of typical creepy crawlies and other non-mammaliam animals many people dislike have no or no obvious social structures or recognizable behavior. The experience of a spider is a lot more alien to us than the experience of a bear. Being social mammals ourselves, it’s much easier to find “humaness” in other mammals than in reptiles or arthropods.
It’s also possible that our coevolution besides canines and felines made it more advantageous to find things like them cute or endearing. The importance of domestication of dogs for our ancestors and cats for agriculture really can’t be overstated. Our minds are good yet terrible at pattern seeking. Quick to recognize patterns, but also very quick to overgeneralize. If recognizing furry top order carnivores as cute increased our fitness, it’s quite possible we’ve overcompensated so to speak. That bit is entirely speculation on my part though in all fairness.
And the last factor I can think of is… most people in a first world country really don’t have any context for what it means to square off with a top order carnivore that can seperate your skull from your neck with a half-assed paw strike whereas everyone has probably been snuck up on and gotten a spook from a harmless spider or non-danger noodle. As ridiculous as it sounds, a lot of people subconciously recognize them as greater risks because they’ve actually encountered one. Bite force, a ton in weight, tempermental behavior (especially if its a mama G-bear). These are all things that are easy enough to read but don’t really set in as anyrhing more than trivia until the threat is potentially real and not hypothetical. Most people who’ve encountered a wild grizzly in the flesh though are much less likely to think they’re cute while they recall shitting their pants.
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