Do animals think we're cute?

Does this count? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

Instead, he encouraged Lovatt to press on with teaching Peter English. But there was something getting in the way of the lessons. “Dolphins get sexual urges,” says the vet Andy Williamson, who looked after the animals’ health at Dolphin House. “I’m sure Peter had plenty of thoughts along those lines.”

“Peter liked to be with me,” explains Lovatt. “He would rub himself on my knee, or my foot, or my hand. And at first I would put him downstairs with the girls,” she says. But transporting Peter downstairs proved so disruptive to the lessons that, faced with his frequent arousals, it just seemed easier for Lovatt to relieve his urges herself manually.

I imagine to most animals we appear absolutely terrifying. this is evidenced by behaviors toward us prior to earning trust.

When elephants look at humans the same regions in their brains activate as when they look at baby elephants. So they probably think we're cute.

Let me ask my dog quick.

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....

He spun in a circle then scooted his but across the carpet. So... Yes?

Not sure if cute is the right word per se, but I know ostriches can sometimes get so attracted to their human farmers that they stop doing mating displays for other ostriches, and only do them for the farmers.

So at least one animal thinks we're hot.

I think you’re cute. Hope you have a great day in knowing you got a well deserved complement.

Dolphins seem to be infatuated with us. I mean like the recent splashdown they did not come to the surface until humans started showing themselves out of the vehicles. My dog loves humans and pretty much all animals she meets but gets more excited the younger they are and just goes bananas when an adult is holding a child. Two for one.

The problem answering this is that there's an uncrossable barrier involved.

We can't, at this point in time, accurately and definitively detect the internal perceptions of animals.

We can, to a limited degree detect how their brains change during a given events. We can observe behaviors as they exist. And, it is possible to compare those to human equivalents.

But they are, at the end of the day equivalents. There's simply no way, at present, to ascribe human concepts to the way they think. The best we can ever say is that animals seem to respond and change in rewards ways that are similar to, or even identical to, the way humans respond to a given stimulus.

"Cute" is a pretty vague concept to begin with, and it's a concept that refers to a complex series of internal reactions we have to external stimuli.

With all of that said, some animals do seem to respond to humans in a similar way we do to animals considered cute by most humans. That's the best we can do until someone cooks up something that lets us more fully track what's going on inside an animal's mind.

Thing is, mind is a concept in the first place, and it isn't exactly defined in measurable and totally objective ways as of yet. So, we'd first have to find a way to "read" human minds before we could start to try and compare that to animal minds. So, that some seem to is likely the best answer we'll have in our lifetimes

Goldfish do;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish

The way my cats look at my I'd say so.

I hardly think so, I think we're seen as dangerous by the smaller and like we see a velociraptor from the bigger.

A lot of animals see cute baby animals as easy food. Although some also see them as scary since they often have angry parents around.