A childhood belief about general

My Dad used to tell about sidehill gougers, a moose looking elk with legs shorter on one side than the other, the better to go around hills. If they went in the valley they would fall over and die. They lived on the hills of SE Ohio. Courting sidehill gougers would burrow under the hills with corkscrews that grew on their noses at puberty (like antlers), and they could walk on the round sides of the tunnels, and pop up on an unrelated hill. There were clockwise and counterclockwise gougers, and they could not intermarry, or 75%their kids would have cross dominant legs, short and long on the same side, and be unable to walk and survive. I was very, very disapointed to find this was not true. I am glad to see others had the same story told to them in their childhoods.

I also thought cows were girl horses, and cats were girl dogs, that all horses and dogs were boys, and that chipmunks thought they owned your house and were hitting you up for rent when they chattered at you.