animals

While making bread, I asked what a yeast was. My mother replied that it was a small gerbil-like creature found in the woods.
For 11 fruitless years I searched nature books for a picture of one...

my grandpa used to tell my sister that cows standing on hills were called "hill cows" and their legs on one side were shorter than the other. she still says that when she sees them

when I was young my aunt would tell me she rode an elaphant to school. since she collected them and they were everywhere in her house, i believed it. bless her soul.

I used to believe that when my dog went out to poo, he was actually laying an egg. I saw him kind of sit down, strain, and then walk away. My mom was really surprised when I brought this "egg" into the house for her to see. Well, after washing all the crap off my hands, I realized that it wasnt an egg after all.

My sister used to believe that butterflies were actually children that had been "transformed" by an evil being (???) and now they were evil and out to get her.

She's 37 now and still screams (no lie) when she sees a butterfly. I proved this recently at wal-mart in the cloth section when I pointed out a lovely piece that had butterflies on it. I said "Oh look at the butterflies!" She screamed in the middle of Walmart. I love butterflies and have several tattoos of them. I'm surprised she isn't terrified of ME. :)

My dad had me believing that if cows were laying down, it was going to rain, because cows only liked to eat dry food.

"But dad, there's not a cloud in the sky."

Like many people on this site, I used to believe that all cats were female and all dogs were male. The weird thing is, my family had both cats and dogs, and my parents showed us kittens and puppies being born, and taught us how to tell between girls and boys, but I still sort of believed it.

I was only seven when we got our cat Tigger. So when he had the "snip" I thought that the vet had cut his willy off. I didn't know much about sex stuff then and I thought it was really cruel as how whould he have a wee.

I thought ponies were baby horses until I was in my 20's. A very bright little girl I was babysitting corrected me. We laughed really hard about it. She was kind enough not to make fun of me.

When I was young (though not as young as I'd like everybody reading this to believe), I believed that white dog poo came exclusively from poodles, and no other make of dog. I can't remember why. It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that it wasn't true. It was related to the amount of chalk in dog food, which is now banned.

I used to think animals led the same kind of lives as us humans. Dad going to work, babies going to school etc, going to the pub at weekends, that kind of thing. Imagine my disappointment when I looked inside a birdhouse and seeing nothing but straw instead of little chairs and a daddy bird reading his newspaper.

When my son was about 7 he killed a frog, and I told him that he shouldn't have done that cause the mother frog would be mad and come looking for him. Well the next morning when we got up it had been raining and there were about 50 frogs on our walk way and he just knew they were ther to get him for killing the frog.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, at night I would see roaches scatter from the front porch. I would also smell a beautiful smell that wasn't there in the daytime when the roaches weren't around. My science teacher gave a talk about pheronomes and I was convinced that was why the roaches smelled so good. It wasn't until years later that I learned my grandmother had night blooming jasmine growing around the porch and was a little sorry to realize that roaches didn't really have much redeeming social value.

Growing up in San Francisco, at the age of 5 or six I was convinced that when it rained it rained worms. After all, after a rain there were worms all over the sidewalks. Perfectly reasonable.

My preschool grandaughter came running in from the backyard, all excited. Grandma, a SNAKE, a SNAKE! I went out to see a worm (the size of the snake in her picture book).

When i was younger I had some gerbles, named Fredy and Jummpy!!! Well one day Fredy ate Jummpy, and my older brother and I took the gerbles to the feild behind our house and dumpped them out! On the way back to the house my brother looked at me and said "You know Fredy will come back as big as you one day and eat you cause you forgot to feed them"!!!! Well for about 3 years i belived him and sleeped with my mom and dad so Fready couldnt get me!!!!

I was always told that if the dog was wagging its tail, it was happy and friendly. If the cat is switching its tail, it was agitated and likely to scratch. I tested this explanation by forcing our happy dog's wagging still. It very quickly became unhappy and bit me. Voila! The adults were right. So, naturally, the next step would be to force the cat's switching tail to hold still and it would be happy... the results weren't what I was expecting.

My family seemed to speak in a constant flow of colloquialisms, which I took for fact. Among them -- if you can put salt on a bird's tail, you can catch it. I would spend hours sneaking up in birds in the backyard with a salt shaker. I was never able to get close enough so I ended up setting my mother's parakeet out to fly around the house. Whenever it landed I was right there salting its tail. Poor thing ended up panting with exhaustion trying to stay away from me and my mother was totally puzzled why there was salt all over the house. It finally did dawn on me that if your close enough to salt the tail, your close enough to grab the bird... duh!