PawSteps · Animals and us
Ten years ago almost nobody could name one. Now they're on lunchboxes. The same thing happened to capybaras. It isn't a coincidence, it isn't gradual, and there's a pattern underneath it that's worth knowing — because the animal everyone suddenly wants is very often the animal that suffers next.
In June 2021 Minecraft released its Caves & Cliffs update and added axolotls — catchable in a bucket, and helpful to you in a fight underwater. Minecraft has hundreds of millions of players, most of them children. An entire generation met the same animal in the same fortnight.
They were built to be liked. A permanently upturned mouth that reads as a smile, wide-set eyes, and feathery pink gills like a crown. Toy companies had plushies in shops within months.
Capybaras — the largest rodents in the world — went viral in 2022 and 2023 on the back of a repetitive TikTok track that essentially just says their name over and over. It got attached to endless clips of capybaras sitting in hot springs, unbothered, with birds and monkeys perched on top of them.
The joke was the calmness. That travelled well in that particular couple of years, and it kept travelling.
Rescue workers call it the Dalmatian effect, after what happened when Disney released a live-action 101 Dalmatians in 1996. Thousands of families bought the puppy from the film. Dalmatians are demanding, energetic dogs that don't always suit young children, and within a year or two shelters were full of them.
It has happened over and over.
| What came out | What people bought | What happened next |
|---|---|---|
| Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles | Pet terrapins | Bought small, grew large, dumped in ponds. Red-eared terrapins are now an invasive species in British waterways. |
| 101 Dalmatians (1996) | Dalmatian puppies | Shelters overwhelmed within a couple of years. |
| Harry Potter | Pet owls | Sanctuaries reported taking in hundreds. One North Wales rescue went from six owls to a hundred. Some birds were released into the wild by owners, where they couldn't survive. |
| Game of Thrones | Huskies and malamutes | UK and US shelters reported large rises in abandonment. One Scottish rescue reported an eight-fold increase. |
J.K. Rowling eventually asked fans directly to stop, saying that anyone who thought an owl would be happy in a small cage in a house was, in her word, wrong
. Peter Dinklage made a similar public plea about huskies. In both cases the buying carried on regardless — which tells you something about how much weight a celebrity request carries against a trend.
A game, a film, an audio clip. Millions of people meet it at once, in a version designed to be appealing — smiling, calm, tame, undemanding.
People want one immediately. The knowledge of how to keep it properly takes years to spread, and often doesn't exist in an accessible form at all. Nobody is being stupid here — the information simply isn't where the demand is.
Breeding scales up fast, and quality drops. Corners get cut on welfare, on health screening and on the age animals are sold at. In the worst cases, wild animals get taken to fill the gap.
The animal turns out to be nocturnal, or noisy, or expensive, or long-lived, or simply not interested in being cuddled. Interest fades. Rescues absorb the difference — and rescues are almost always volunteers, running out of space and money.
Cool water — cooler than most homes stay — and a tank, not a lap. They're a watching animal, not a handling one, and warm water makes them ill.
They're also critically endangered in the wild, in one lake system near Mexico City, while being bred in enormous numbers in captivity. Both are true at once, and the captive ones don't help the wild ones.
This one deserves its own section, because the gap between the animal in the videos and the animal in real life is enormous, and because the misunderstanding at the heart of it is one we recognise from our own hedgehogs.
The famous clips are mostly Japanese zoos in winter. Capybaras sitting to their necks in a steaming pool, sometimes with a yuzu fruit bobbing past, occasionally with a bird or a monkey perched on their back, entirely unbothered.
Two things are worth knowing about that. The hot spring is enrichment provided by keepers — not a thing capybaras do in the wild. And the animals in shot are surrounded by other capybaras, which is a very large part of why they look so settled.
So the zen everybody sees is partly a threat response with the volume turned down. That's the same mistake people make with hedgehogs — an animal that expresses stress by going quiet and motionless gets read as calm, because stillness looks like contentment to us. Research on hedgehogs in care has measured raised stress hormones in animals that appear perfectly relaxed. Different species, identical error.
If you take one idea from this page, take that one: an animal that isn't reacting is not necessarily an animal that's happy.
| What | Why it isn't optional |
|---|---|
| Water deep enough to submerge in | They cool themselves in it, mate in it, sleep half-in it, and escape into it when frightened. A paddling pool is not a substitute for something they can get properly under. |
| Other capybaras | Wild groups run to ten or twenty, and bigger in the dry season. One capybara on its own is a stressed capybara. Keeping one properly means keeping several, and the costs multiply with them. |
| Serious space | Adults reach around 60kg — roughly a Labrador, in the body of a rodent. They graze, they roam, and they aren't a house animal. |
| Coarse grass, constantly | Their teeth never stop growing and need grinding down. Soft food means overgrown teeth and a vet who may never have treated one. |
| Vitamin C in the diet | Like guinea pigs, their close relatives, capybaras can't make their own. Get the diet wrong and you get deficiency disease. |
| Somewhere they can toilet in water | Which is what they prefer to do. They also scent-mark. Neither is compatible with a carpet. |
| Eight to ten years of it | Longer with good care. This is a decade-long commitment to a herd of large semi-aquatic rodents. |
There's one more thing that surprises people: capybaras eat their own droppings. It isn't a fault or a sign of illness — it's how they get a second pass at digesting grass, the same as rabbits do. But it tells you plainly that this is a grazing herd animal with a specialised gut, not a large friendly dog.
If you're seriously considering any exotic animal: ring your local council's licensing team and ask, before money changes hands. It's a free phone call and it's the only answer that binds anybody.
That's the Dalmatian effect landing on a species already classed as vulnerable to extinction in Britain. Somebody sees a cute hedgehog online, wants one, and somewhere down the chain a wild animal gets taken out of a hedgerow to meet that want.
It's why the same conservation bodies won't supply hedgehogs for television, and why we're careful about how we show ours.
Not "don't like animals". Liking animals is the good part. The useful move is to put time between the wanting and the getting.
No right answers. These work well as a discussion in a group.