Abstract
Animals have always represented an important part of life and thus they can evoke a wide range of emotions. This work has focused on the positive emotions evoked by animals in humans, specifically beauty as seen by human eyes.
Since there is a multitude of species in the world that belong to various taxonomic groups, it is important to examine, how humans cognitively categorize them and what characteristics influence the perception of beauty in individual groups. The question was whether the size and shape of the animals' bodies or their colour and markings influence their beauty.
Previous research has successfully employed the testing method of presenting stimuli in form of photographed animals, which were then rated by respondents according to perceived beauty. Numerous works based on this method originated, studying both positive andnegative attitude towards animals, which enabled furtherresearch to be carried out in other countries.
Cross-cultural comparison of the perception of beauty is an important part of the research of animal beauty, because it allows acomparison of opinionson animals of people from different cultural backgrounds, including native groups still living in hunter-gatherer hierarchy to this day. Identical features of what is seen as beautiful across cultures would imply that the positive perception of animals evolved before the humans settled the whole world and is thus independent of the current environment.
The perception of animal beauty is an interesting subject not merely from an evolutionary standpoint, but also since it opens a possibility to use the findings in campaigns targeted to help endangered species. This work is a summary of results of studies focused on positive perception of animals on different levels and in different contexts, and it offers a concise overview of the perception of beauty by humans.