general

I know my dog, Palmer, spoke English, he was just really quiet.

Klayne P.

i used to believe that sausages were to pigs as eggs are to hens

stuart swanston

When I was younger, I would sleep at my grandmother's house, in the guest bedroom. She told me not to sleep under the window, because of the "terrible draft". For the following few years, I avoided that bed fearing that the "terrible giraffe" would stick his head in and hurt me somehow.

Mike

"Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!"
My little cousin Melissa used to love the Wizard of Oz. Well, when we took her to the zoo one time, she kept asking to see the "Oh My's". It took us such a long time to figure out that she thought Oh My's were a real animal from the song in the movie!

Lisa Lynette

I took 'Peter Cottontail' a bit seriously, and thought that all cotton came from rabbits' tails. The first time I saw a bag of 100 cotton balls, I was horrified. Then I figured they must shed them or have them shaved off like sheep's wool. Learning about the slaves and cotton in the South set me straight.

queeneve

I used to believe that we had invisible giraffes in our house. Whenever my mother said, "There's a draft in here," I used to think that she was saying "giraffe." I'd look and look and couldn't see a giraffe. The idea of something that large wandering around the house without me being able to see it was quite frightening.

Penny

I use to think sheep shrank when it rained.

Anon

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.

Jill

When I was little I filled my pockets with rabbit droppings because I thought they were special, shiny, black pebbles.

Karen

For some reason I had got it my mind that humans were the creators of all life. My mother was, to say the least, surprised when asked her to give birth to a cat, since I just gotten a sister.

Anon

When I was younger I used to belive that bats were imaginary.

This was because the only place I had ever seen them was in Scooby Doo cartoons!

I was actually mid-teens before I realised that they were real.
The only way I found out was by watching a wildlife documentry on TV, I was very disappointed when I saw them because I had always imagined them to be the size of a seagull!!

Sarah H

for years I thought a rubber sheep inhabited our garden. I was about 8 or 9 before it turned into a rubbish heap.

Anon

For some reason, cows all seem to face the same way when standing in a field (honest - you look!). I used to believe that this was because they all pointed to magnetic north. Odd child...

Amanda

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.

Helen Yates (UK)

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...

rachael

My dad tricked me, my brothers and my sister into thinking that cows were all carnivorous and that they weren't really eating grass, they were searching for small animals under the ground.

becky

When I was about 7 we lived close to a fast flowing creek, which a couple of kids had drowned in over the years. So in order to stop me and my two brothers from going down there our parents told us that there were beavers down there, and they are really aggressive animals that attack kids and chew their legs off.............Needless to say we were freaked out and never went down to the creek.

But, after we moved away they never told us the true story about beavers (very scared, non aggressive animals). So when I was about 18 (!) I made a complete fool of myself by loudly exclaiming to by boyfriend and his father "Don't go near the beavers nest- They'll attack you!!!"
Hmm............

Helena

i used to believe that bunny's could fly with their ears.

Anon

I used to believe that since humans peed a liquid that fish must have peed air and thats why there were bubbles in the water.

lizzy

my brother once told me that baby cows were called humperdinks. i believed this until i was 12! when i wrote in an essay about them at school. my teacher read it out and my class was in hysterics! i didnt know what i had done wrong until a friend filled me in!

diannah