Strange animal in my house!

[MotherOfBengals]

Growing up in an animal loving family I’ve always taken it for granted that people know their animal species. I currently have 8 house rabbits, and 2 cats.

Yesterday I had a guy out to repair a window and he saw one of my rabbits. He looked at her and asked what kind of animal it was. He genuinely didn’t know, and was amazed when I told him it was a rabbit and said he had no idea they were so big!

Talking to friends, one said a guy she worked with called 999 as he had a hedgehog In his house and didn’t know what was.

Another said she remembered her mum somehow thinking that a hedgehog and a badger were the same size...and another time her mum asked if the pet geckos had lungs 😐

This has made me wonder what other similar stories people have?

We mistook a shrew for a mouse in the kitchen until we caught it and saw its snout. We knew what it was when we saw it but had no previous experience of a shrew indoors!

More than one person swore blind that the cat they saw was a lion!

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/essex-lion-revealed-the-ginger-cat-1283131.amp

“Well I seen a horse fly
I seen a dragon fly
I seen a house fly”

😹😹

So technically I know that turkeys can fly, but I had only ever seen them walking (strutting) firmly on terra firma..until I saw one flying and omg what a sight. I now know why they were confident they could get a jumbo jet off the ground, ungainly and clinging on to hope are the only ways to describe a turkey in flight.

They must be real!

I went into Waitrose a day or two before Burns Night last year and couldn't find any haggises, and when I asked, the butcher told me that the last few in the shop had escaped.

When we went to the Natural History Museum years ago they had a stuffed polar bear. My kids were amazed at the size of it as they thought they were about the size of a labrador. To be fair, when you see them on wildlife programmes there's nothing to compare them to in relation to size, for example a car.

🙀 a fox sized stoat or weasel! Thats a scary thought. Wind in the Willows has a lot to answer for lol.

As a bona fide northerner living in London I thought my colleague (lived in Tring) was winding me up when she told me she had a glis glis infestation. I have never heard of them before and thought she’d made up an animal.

That reminds me of thisHorniman walrus

The Victorian taxidermists had never seen a live walrus so they didn’t know when to stop stuffing the poor thing.

Oh dear… obviously didn’t attend her Vampire studies at school

I use to have polecats ( same family as ferrets) and take them out for walks. Most people would stop and stare which is understandably as they are not a common sight. The have been mistaken for alsorts of animals, stoats and weasle ( understandable) otters , beavers, skunks, dwarf cats, squirrels , and even baby seals.

I was recounting my last outing with them to a friend who admitted he wouldn't know what one looked like , so I sent him a couple of pictures of them eating / playing / sleeping and one photo where one of them is playing in a soil filled window box with the caption , " how to grow your own polecat" he phoned back immediately asking how did I learn to grow one in a window box ?
He was not joking !

I knew someone who thought Wombles were real animals 😂

Or the kangaroo painting by George Stubbs, based on an inflated skin brought back from an early expedition.

Not an animal but my reasonably intelligent DD(12 at the time) asked how we'd water the plants in our aquarium I will never let her live it down

One of my daughter's friends thought penguins had fur, not feathers.

@MotherOfBengals how do your cats and your rabbits get along? I assume neither is in danger from the other but what did they think when they were first introduced?! Are they friends now - do your cats snuggle up with the rabbits for bodily warmth?

I think a lot of people think narwhals are fictional - presumably getting them mixed up with unicorns?!

I remember being at the zoo years ago and this silly woman confidently tell her child the red panda they were looking at was a ‘fox-monkey’.
She didn’t even have the wit to read the sign on the enclosure, naming the animal for her!!! 🙄

To be fair, I've never heard anyone call a dormouse a "glis glis" before. Just say dormouse!

One plumber refused to come into my house because we had a cat sleeping on the stairs (plain glass in living room door, he could see through to the stairs). He wanted me to wake up my cat and take the poor bugger outside, I would have had to get the cat near him to remove him ... it was bizarre.

They are called 'edible dormice' but very different from a native dormouse - a glis glis is almost a bit squirrelly!

Tring is famous for its Glis Glis infestations! You used to be able to buy special traps for them in the local hardware stores (probably still can, but I haven't been back for some time now).

OP, I need to know if your friend's mum thought badgers were hedgehog-sized or hedgehogs were badger-sized... Or were they both an average of the two?

Oh I’m one of these people. I have no spatial awareness about animals. The day I found out how big moose are blew my mind. I thought they were sort of zebra sized. Then I found out about bald eagles which I’d imagined as larger, stockier parrots.

Oh and bears. No idea how big a bear is.

Omg 😂