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?

YABU. Everyone knows it's "one shoop, two sheep".

When our pom was a puppy he managed to break his leg and was on cage rest. A guy came round to fit our carpets and after nearly shitting himself when he realised he wasnt a teddy bear asked if he was a chinchilla! I mean he was small but very obviously a dog, albeit with a bright purple splint.

Geckos do have lungs, or is that the point?

i think that was the point.. 😉

My dog has been mistaken for a sheep on numerous occasions.
Once he was described as a miniature alpaca

She’s gorgeous, OP!

TBF her coat is quite chinchilla like. As you say, if you don’t frequent Pets at Home, you might not know that rabbits come in different colours, long haired and short haired, and anything from teeny tiny to dog sized 😂

Rabbits can be vicious! A kick from a Flemish Giant could break a bone. I always remember going on a school trip to a safari park with DC’s class where a child asked if the lions ever fought each other only to be told by the guide it was the rabbits that were always fighting 😂 I quite like the fact that it usually the females that are the dominant top bunny In the warren and in each pair.

To be fair, I describe my just over 3kg house rabbit as the size of a small cat when people ask how big he is. He’s a lot bigger than the other rabbit we have and much much bigger than some of my friends rabbits - but definitely not a giant rabbit!

DB used to have polecats. And chinchillas. He was ahead of the game in the unusual pets stakes.

(We also know about glis glis from a previous house - they are demons if you get them in the attic, and you’re not allowed to touch them. I mean in a ‘terminate with extreme prejudice’ kind of way. Only the council-approved people can do that.)

My friend told me she'd found a dead bat in her bathroom sink. It was a large hairy moth & her b/f said she was the bat, a daft one at that.

Yes, in a sense I can understand. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I picked her up and he had stroke in childlike glee marvelling at how soft she was.

He was also foreign, spoke good English with an accent. I would have thought he was born here but possibly parents might have been first generation here.

She does also have a slightly tilted head, probably from a previous infection at some point - we don’t have her history, she was handed in by the police to a practice my vet friend works at, but this can make her seem a bit odd the way she will look up at you with her head on side.

The group of 3 downstairs, consists of 2 males and the one female. She is in the middle. Dominant of one, under the other.

My upstairs group, 3 males and 2 females, one female is the matriarch. She rules. They do as they are told.

Aww, I can see the sheep in him - he has a sheep - ish head and looks quite woolly too. 😻

@Mydogisagentleman

My ddog would love to meet yours then! He already tries to round up any dog that's white and fluffy (bichon frise being a favourite) but your looks even more sheeplike. No prizes for guess dogs breed!

He also attempts rounding up of humans with rather limited success but did make progress on rounding up chickens for my neighbours and was excellent on fox patrol

Some teenage girls thought my red brindled greyhound was a tiger.

Youngest daughter was irrationally terrified of foxes. We live in the middle of the countryside, foxes (usually seen at a distance) are a common occurrence, but we didn't dare mention them in front of her.

When she got older it turned out she'd got wolves and foxes conflated in her head. Meeting a fox face to face for the first time was a bit of an eye opener for her. She's 27 now, and not afraid of foxes any more. I'd hate to see her meet a wolf though.

Someone once asked me if my whippet was half kangaroo

I always thought a wolverine was a mythical animal until a few years ago. I had honestly never heard of them.

beautiful he he he

Thank you for this, very interesting.
I always imagined buffalo wings to be more on top, Pegasus style lol.
Guess I don’t know as much about animals as I thought 😸

You could show them this too

https://cottagelife.com/outdoors/peckish-polar-bear-makes-a-house-call-in-search-of-dinner/

Next door neighbour’s son (about 8 at the time) thought our tortoiseshell cat was a fox.

She liked to sit staring at them through the patio doors because she knew it freaked them out.

Haha!

I had a friend who thought the same. Found out when we went to our local zoo and there were a couple there. She was standing there staring with mouth open, completely stunned - it was funny to watch.

@Sarvanga38

Stoats are weasely recognised but weasels are stoatily different

Listened into a conversation about whether a penguin was a fish or a bird once

No no no, the haggis skins are used only for the sporran, not the kilt!! Kilts are woven and made from the fluffy part of shoops/sheps/sheep/sheeps.

As to buffalo wings, it's a well-known fact that back in pioneer days the prairie skies were dark with flocks of airborne buffalo. And even one buffalo poo descending from on high is a memorable experience. That's why the covered wagons had to be covered. Every so often the wagons would be drawn into a circle formation and a designated pioneer woman would hike up her skirts and walk the roofs of the wagons, removing the buffalo dung with a special implement called a pala para excrementos de búfalo.

The local First Nations people would shoot down the buffalo with bows and arrows from horseback. This practice was known to the pioneers as a 'tontery,' likely derived from una tontería. As the wings were relatively small and feathery the hunters often abandoned this part of their kill, and the pioneers scavenged them, cooking them over a wood fire of an evening when the magnificent prairie sunsets loomed overhead. The copious buffalo dung littering the ground would be dried and used for fuel for the fires. After eating their fill, the pioneers' voices would be raised in song celebrating the New World and its bounty, such as 'Home, Home on the Range' with the original lyrics: 'Oh give me a sky/ Where the buffalo fly/ And it's always a wingèd buffet, /Where seldom is heard/A discouraging word/And the skies are quite dangerous all day'.

Jump to the modern day and the echoes of these traditions are to be found in bars where buffalo wings are seasoned in various ways and served with kegs of beer. To this end buffalo are commercially farmed and herds of them may be seen in the flatlands of America, with precautions taken to make sure they don't resume the ancient ways of their species and fly away.