Raccoons are far more dangerous in their tendency to spread disease and be a pest. Yeah, possums will hole up under your house and eat your catfood, but pretty much any wild scavenger animal would do that. To have such a hatred of them, I'd say they would need to have a lot more going against them than simply not doing what you want them to do. *edit* I bet that people would hate raccoons way more than they do now based on their behavior if it weren't for the fact that they are fucking adorable. They are the great Masked Bandits.
Can people get that? Because if they're not racing with a small Filipino on their backs or pulling a plow, do we really need horses anymore either?
Sorry to reinforce your fear of earwigs, but I had one in my ear once. It was horrible. He made me bleed from my inner ear, I was young & I thought I was dying- but that sonofabitch got his when the ER doctor pulled him out in 2 pieces. I am still traumatized. Focus: Besides earwigs & mosquito I have an irrational fear and hatred of snakehead fish. Those bitches can crawl OUT OF THE WATER (and I just read that they can live out of the water for up to 4 days, provided they are wet. Oh god). Damn invasive species. Luckily I have never seen any near where I live, but I swear I saw one a park in Richmond, VA before.
I respect all animals' right to exist, even reptiles and creepy crawlies. Ticks, however, give me the fucking heebie jeebies. If I get on one me, I turn into a little girl and stick whichever body part it's attached to into an open flame. It's sending shivers up my spine right now just thinking about those nasty fuckers. And I would advocate the extinction of mosquitoes if it wouldn't lead to the extinction of the cute little bats. Cats are fucking stupid, though. Those pointless cocksuckers need to get their furry asses extincted.
For all those who speak of possums you need to get one of the possums that frequent New Zealand trapped in a corner. They are viscious nasty big fuckers who will try to go through you to get their freedom. Nothing worse than having one live in your walls, shit, piss, have babies and die everywhere and stink the fucking house out.
One of my guiding principles of life is not to corner wild animals. It's one of those "common sense" things that has served me well. Hell, even domestic dogs will snap at you if you corner them.
Speaking of cats: They are the definitive host of Toxoplasma gondii. 13% of humans carry this due to our close proximity to house cats. This parasite lives in a hormone secreting cyst in your brain and alters the behavior of the intermediate hosts that it infects. If a preganant woman catches it while early on in pregnancy, her fetus will die. Humans who have it are seen to do reckless, impulsive, and abnormally anxious things. Young men get into significantly more car wrecks and young women are more promiscuous than their uninfected counterparts. It's normal intermediate, rodents, are seen to ignore the scent of cat urine so that they can be eaten by the cats. It does not effect the rodents' fear of anything else. So, question: Do YOU have a parasite living in your brain? (I don't mean to hijack the thread but we learned about that this week and I thought it was interesting)
Probably. My two kitties are awesome but I have no doubt that one of them is a germ-ball. We found him when he was abandoned under a bush shortly after birth and the poor dear is just...retarded. He's six, too. He gets many baths but the self-bathing leaves much to be desired. However, if the worst that will happen to me is increased promiscuity...sign me up for more cats. Focus: I get visibly ill just looking at the picture below. I'm putting it in NSFW tags because I don't want anyone getting fired for running away from their desk screaming or for bashing their monitor in with their keyboard. WORST CREATURE EVER: [rnsfw][/rnsfw] I think there's a scientific name for this, but I don't give a fuck. I call it GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE AND OFF MY INTERNETS.
Termites make my skin crawl, I hate them. They are all over in Phoenix and when I see a tube I pour as much poison as I have on them. Fuckers My favorite gross animal are squid, bad ass animals and will pretty much murder every other animal Spoiler
I thought my girlfriend was weird for calling the giant fruit bats here cute. Do people actually think rats with wings are adorable? Cats are not pointless. If there were no cats, how could we know who the crazy women and lesbians are?
I will second this one. I fucking hate house centipedes. They are disgusting and creepy and I hate their long horrible tons of legs. I used to find them in my old apartment all the time. It was horrible. I would be at my computer and one would skitter across the wall. The worst part was when I couldn't catch it and kill it in time so I knew it was somewhere in my apartment ... just waiting. My skin crawls just thinking about it. I also hate bees, but that's partly because I'm allergic to them. I turn into a 5 year old when I see a bee. If I'm out on my balcony having a cigarette and a bee comes I will put out the cigarette and run inside and stare out the window until it goes away. I feel pathetic but I would rather not swell up like a balloon and have to stab myself.
My cat kills and sometimes eats house centipedes, and really any other bug she can get her paws at. She's a good mouser too. Focus: Little yapper dogs. Seriously, what's the point? It's like taking the negative traits of both cats and dogs and combining them into one animal. Of course the funny thing is without humans to breed and keep them they really would go extinct because there's just no way they could survive on their own in the wild.
Humanitarian focus: Guinea worm. It enters through the digestive tract as a larva, and then slowly burrows through your body and comes out your fucking leg. And it's THREE FUCKING FEET LONG. Yeah... put me down for Reason #1491 Not To Visit Africa. Thankfully, WHO and the rest of the UN have been hard at work getting rid of this thing, and it'll be completely gone in the next couple decades. Personal focus: Ticks. I had Lyme disease sophomore year of high school. The tick that spreads it is the size of a sesame seed, and it loves sitting in armpits where you have absolutely no hope of finding it. It then gives you an infection so shitty that you basically sit there on the couch crying in pain for months. Fuck that shit.
You know what's awesome? A parasite that chews off your tongue, and then permanently anchors itself in your mouth in order to steal all your food. Just think about that for a second. Contemplate what it would be like to have something squirm into your mouth, clamp pincers onto the base of your tongue, bite off the rest and then remain there, wiggling, for the rest of your life. Mother Nature is a hateful whore. Spoiler Oh look, it's smiling.
Skunks. Sure, Flower was cute. The rest are NOT. Fuck, these little striped scavenger pricks are everywhere up here. It's no big secret on here I hate them. They aren't dangerous as before since they've eradicated rabies in Ontario, but they can flatten their pudgy little bodies like pancakes and squeeze under my shed door, where the garbage is kept. The two that dwell around by backyard, Bob and Steve, I often run into when I go out at night trying to pull out the jury-rigged dam I put in to block them from getting in. The warmingly wave their tails at me as if to say: BOB: "Oh, hi Mr. [Crown Royal]! We're going to soon figure out how to break into your shed again, tear open the garbage bags containing your kid's rancid diapers, then drop a couple of warm, steamy dumps to fester in this nont-so-ventilated wood structure. And a Merry Christmas to you, too!" STEVE: "Oh, and don't open the door in the dark while we're in here and surprise us, silly man! Otherwise you'll force us to do that over-the-top horrible thing us skunks are so famous for!" BOB: "...and it ain't dancin' the Running Man!" Skunks. Herd them all into Alaska.
Red squirrels. Little fucking bastards. I've always been a live and let live kind of guy but there are limits. We had them at the cottage coming around the bird feeder. You could see they were total dicks; not only chasing off the other squirrels but going after the larger birds like blue jays. Still, we let them be. Then last spring we went to the Caribbean for a week and came back to find a number of our ceiling tiles at the cottage had been chewed through. The holes and teeth marks were too big to be a mouse. As well, some of our Christmas lights were no longer working as something had chewed right through the wire. I had seen a red squirrel run into a gap in the cottage near the roof, so I Googled it and it turns out these little suckers are, as one website put it, "chainsaws with legs". I promptly went out and and bought a pellet gun and implemented a shoot-on-site policy. They make it quite easy since they're so cocky. They just run to the nearest tree and sit there barking at you and flicking their tail, unlike the black and gray squirrels which run away as fast as they can. Beagles: We've had 4 dogs for a while. About 5 years back we lost our German Shepherd; a beautiful, magnificent 120 lbs dog that I adored. 6 months later we were ready to adopt again and got this cute little beagle mix puppy. Never fucking again. He's the most annoying, whiny, fat, douche bag, asshole little dog I've ever come across.
Any dog that is smaller than a basketball and makes as much fucking noise as an air raid horn is not a dog. It is a fucking rat and should be treated as such. Jack Russels are an exception, those things are fucking cool.
I know a guy who smokes up frequently, usually in his garage. A few weeks back he was telling me he heard a strange noise after he had smoked, and just figured it was nothing. Ten minutes later he hears it again, so he goes back to the garage to investigate. The bag of weed he had left lying on his worktable was torn open, wet, and missing a few grams. The moral of the story is that possums are assholes, and you shouldn't leave weed lying around. FOCUS: House centipedes. Fucking useless at anything but freaking people out. They eat insects, sure, but they also eat the spiders that eat those insects, and as much as I hate spiders, at least they usually don't blend right into my carpet. Also, spiders. Ok, I get that they eat pest insects, and I really appreciate that. That said, for something that also jumps out of sink drains at me and bites me in my sleep, they do a piss poor job. I just caught (and accidentally killed) a massive house cricket this morning. That's the second one I've seen in two days. Back in the summer, I had flies sneaking in through one of my windows. Spiders didn't do fuck all to settle that shit. Point is, it's a tough job market right now, and if you can't do the job right, get the fuck out. That includes people AND spiders. As an aside, every time we run a thread about animals, I almost feel pity for those of you in Australia. That continent and it's fauna surfaced from the depths of a Hell so dark even Satan wouldn't look there. On the other hand, that's resulted in you all turning out some pretty badass people.
No no no. Lesbians have dogs. Specifically, they have Labs - doesn't matter the color, although black does seem to be the favorite. Spinsters have cats - they also may be lesbians, but the difference is that they don't know it. Focus - I almost forgot - we have these bitches in my basement and I HATE them. May I present the Camel Cricket. They looks like a half spider/half cricket monstrosity and they are super fast and can pretty much jump over your head. Every once in a while they end up in my shower and I freak out until my wonderful & brave GF gets rid of it for me. She is magic and can actually catch them with her bare hands. That is mainly why I keep her around. Spoilered because they are so freaking creepy & I don't want to look at it: Spoiler http://www.google.com/url?source=imglanding&ct=img&q=http://manginamonologues.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/camel-cricket.jpg&sa=X&ei=oiDFTrv3BMng0QGzg4X_Dg&ved=0CAwQ8wc&usg=AFQjCNFYVJvm6E7mkXQyld7waCJjx6rN6Q