When it comes to animals, beauty is totally ageist.
As it is with humans, beauty also is fleeting when it comes to animals.
I thought about this after a photo of the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden’s bottle-fed hippo Fiona with her tongue sticking out popped in my Facebook news feed.
Boy is she adorable.
Just in case you are not up on your hippo current events, Fiona received around-the-clock care after she was born six weeks prematurely on Jan. 25.
The zoo reached out to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to help give the pretty, pretty hippo an IV.
The whole thing was just so dang tender and adorable.
We all watched in wonder as Fiona with her gummy-bear like cuteness started packing on the pounds.
She’s 116 pounds now, but eventually the little beast will be a 3,500-pound beast that can crush crocodiles with her jaws.
She’s cute as a blubbery button, but sooner or later that cuteness will drop off and Fiona will be a lady hippo.
Just like with people, a hippo’s youthful good looks don’t last forever you see.
I am hoping that Fiona is being raised to be a strong herbivorous woman and not to lean too heavily on her cuteness.
The posing for adorable pictures is great, but Fiona should be doing some important hippo in captivity stuff.
I don’t know what that is. I am no zoologist.
From what I’ve seen, zoo hippos eat, sleep and submerge themselves in water.
Those are important skills Fiona should and probably is being taught because one day, someone is going to see her and think “Fiona looks OK, but she is no Kim Kardashian.”
We are going to move on to the next cute baby animal, which is what we as a species do.
Cuteness is such a silly concept, isn’t it?
I know people who won’t eat lamb because they are so cute. These same people tear though hamburgers like a vulture making a meal of a hippo carcass.
Baby vultures are pretty cute, too.