According to Darwin's concept of natural selection, species that have the traits best suited for thriving in its environment have the greatest chance of passing on those traits to the next generation. Thus, species are forced to adapt and evolve because of drastic changes to their environment - global drops in temperature, for example, or huge flaming rocks in the sky, or even (as Hollywood tells us) a numerically significant date in the calender.
But that's forgetting the biggest kahuna of 'drastic change to the environment'. That's right: if you want to know who's always roughing up Mother Nature, that would be none other than humanity itself. Humans have always had a massive impact on the evolutionary development of other creatures - how else could such an abominable creature as the Chihuahua (surely, a being that should be placed in the Bestiary right between Basilisk and Chimera) have come into existence, if not to fulfill the extremely narrow ecological niche of being the pet companion to little old ladies?
If Little Old Lady was a character class, then "Summon Pet Chihuahua" would be a level 1 ability.
A Selection of Slavery and Sauce: How Animals Sucked Up to Survive
When humans first appeared on the planet, there was much ruckus as the assorted species went, "Oh-oh, look who's here to wreck the place!" The smarter animals were of course the first to arrive at the adage that has served the minimum wage worker well for ages: If you can't beat 'em, work for 'em!
A brilliant adaptation to the human-dominated environment is to make yourself as useful to humans as possible, thus ensuring your survival. As evidenced by the following paleolithic cave painting, which painstakingly recreates the life of the prehistoric caveman, animals have availed themselves to human service since the Stone Age:
In addition to bad dental hygiene, the Stone Age also featured atrocious labor laws.
Alas, this was not to last. As human civilization rapidly advanced, Stone Age technology became obsolete, and animals found themselves increasingly replaced by machines (even for sex - uh, so I'm told). Being 'useful' to humans would no longer suffice. Fortunately, some species found another, evolutionarily revolutionary tactic: to become tasty.
Now, being tasty has always been a backward adaptation in Darwin's world. You don't want to be tasty. You don't want to give big, nasty predators more incentive to hunt you down and eat you. You want them to take one taste of you and spit you out, then go blog about how bad you taste. But humans, the cow revolutionaries realized, are different. Humans are lazy. All that hunting and stuff? Too much work. Wouldn't it be easier if your food just hanged around all day and let you slaughter them without too much fuss?
And so the cows latched on this radical idea: by making themselves really easy prey to the humans, they ensured that humans would keep them around to be eaten! They have bargained away their milk and their meat, purchasing the future of their species in exchange for surrendering themselves to a gastronomical fate!
Survival of the Cutest
But the Bovine Bargain does not work for everybody. For some species, selling away the meat of their body, even if it means the future of the species, is too distasteful a path to take. For others... well, others are simply too distasteful, and no amount of seasoning will change that.
But evolution takes many twists and turns. Humans have many peculiarities, one among many being their proclivity towards cute animals. Cats, those evil, cunning & manipulative predators, quickly seized on this predilection, and ruthlessly exploited it by adopting cute mannerisms (cuteflaging, as opposed to camouflaging) when in the presence of humans. This tactic has been purringly successful, as we bear witness to those feline masterminds insinuating themselves into human households everywhere.
With the advent of cute animal crusaders (as in, crusaders for cute animals, not animal crusaders who are cute), we can expect more and more species to become cuter in order to survive. The logic is impeccable: Our presence on this planet ravages the environment and pushes many species to the brink of extinction. Humans (especially teenage girls) will go out of their way to rescue cute animals from extinction. Therefore, only animals deemed 'cute' by the average teenage girl will survive to pass on their cute-encoded genes to the next generation. The Darwinian process is thus ruthlessly adhered. In the future, we can expect all animals to be furrier, fluffier and much more adorable. It's a matter of survival.
And what of those animals that are useless to humans, are not tasty, and considered far too ugly for salvation? The sad fact is that ugly animals have no place in the human-dominated world. The next extinction event will most certainly be an ugly one.
Animals in danger of extinction due to excessive ugliness.
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