animals

Our bus driver's daughter rides along on our route, so everyone on the bus talks to her before our stop.
She's pretty little, so everyone always says stuff like,"what does a cat say?" One day, somebody said "what sound does a shark make?" and she starts making the "scary music" theme from jaws! (da da, DA DA, NANANANA!)She thought that sharks made that sound, because in the movie scary music plays before it attacks someone... cute...

I use to think that there were HILL COWS!

Okay, this one's for my sister. When she was about 24 years old, she and her cousin rented an apartment together. Well, one evening he was watching the Discovery channel. The program was about zebras. My sister walked by him and began to laugh hysterically. When he asked her why she was laughing, she said "You don't really believe in zebras, do you?, I guess you believe in unicorns, too".

When I was young, I used to believe that all dogs where boys and all cats were girls, and when they would "get married", they would have little cats and dogs.

When I was little I learned about micro-organisms, and how they were tiny invisible creatures that were all around us. So when my friend was sleeping over, she thought she heard a voice, and we became convinced the micro-organisms were talking to her! I had read a book that said you could fit a certain number of them on a head of a pin, just to demonstrate how small they are. But we took this to mean that they lived on pins, so we spent a long time staring at a head of a "pin" (it was actually a thumb-tack) and trying to contact the micro-organisms! We were strange kids.

A belief that many people share, I'm sure - if you find a baby bird on the ground, out of its nest..."Don't pick it up!" they tell you. The mother bird will smell your scent on the baby and will refuse to care for it.

I learned in college this is not true: most birds don't have a sense of smell at all, so no mother bird will reject her baby because it smells like a human. "Officials" just don't want people picking up baby birds!

When I was about 5 or 6, my parents bought me a ZooBook magazine.The issue was about butterflies. There was an article in it: How to become a butterfly! Being only 5 or 6 I believed it and crawled into a sleeping bag, waited a few minutes, and jumped out (like the directions said)expecting to be a butterfly.

When i was little, i used to believe that animals NEVER slept, and when i was 6, i saw a puppy sleeping on Television and thought it was dead. I was really odd when i was little :)

My family moved to England when I was five. I had previously lived in South Africa, and had never seen or heard a pigeon before. Often in the early morning I heard a distinct, repeated "coo coo" sound coming from outside my bedroom window. Overwhelmed with curiosity at the strange noise, I would race over to the window and fling the curtains open to see what it was. But all I could see was the moon in the sky (the pigeon was sitting above my window well out of my sight) Not able to see the bird, I immediately connected the moon with the noise, and for years after thought the moon made cooing noises in the morning.

Once my mom was reading me a bedtime story and I asked what a bull was. She said it was a male cow...and I couldn't figure out why there would be a special name for the cow postmen, not to mention why on earth the cows wrote each other letters. Seriously. She clarified it as soon as she stopped laughing...

As a kid, TV had led me to believe that mice were sweet and loving animals that would be my friends. So one day I tried to rescue one from the cat. I shooed Betty away and tried to help the injured rat - and was repayed by getting bitten on the finger! We had to go to hospital, and I received the "don't trust stray animals" lecture.

My family always took all our animals, and there were a lot of them, to the vet. They said that the animals would get very sick if we didn't, so I used to believe that wild animals would walk into a vet's office on their own so they wouldn't get sick and die.

I used to be afraid to let our cat sleep in my bed with me, because my brother told me that cats suck out your souls through your nose while you are sleeping. I know, I was a deeply disturbed child.

This happened when I was in Kindergarten. I guess it was around St. Patrick's day, because the teacher was talking about leprachuns and such, when she said "Did you know, there's a pot of gold at the end of rainbows?" and this kid in the class said "I found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow once, but a bird took it."

Well, the teacher didn't really say anything in response to the kid, so for years after that, I not only thought that the story of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was true, but also I thought that the pot of gold ended up in some bird's nest somewhere.

When I was nine, my brothers friends convinced me that a haggis was a four legged animal. I started to smell a rat when they tried to convince me that its front legs were shorter than its back legs, so it could stand up straight on a hill.

when i was little i went to the beach and there were loads of barnacles stuck to the rocks and i asked my dad what they were there for and he told me that creatures lived inside them so for some reason i thought he meant little miniature elephants and polar bears. I belived that until i was about 9 years old.