I’m indecisive…
I’m exactly where @jbroadhead is re: spiders and salticids (secretly wonder if my affection for salt is some sub-conscious motivator here? though they are just pretty cute for something terrifying) but I’m hoping to eventually be where @tigerbb is!
By the way, if anyone is curious, it takes ticks at least a few minutes to transmit anything (at least what we’re working with in the northeast U.S.) and most things it’s more like many hours while they get their mouth parts attached and in you so while it’s creepy to hold them for a photo we’re not in any danger unless we lose track of them and they hide on us and bite
This is my biggest ‘nope’ aside from wolf spiders and their other freaky friends: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/49553-Scutigeromorpha
so much so that I just had to hold my hand in front of the screen while copying the link because the image was making me convulse. I see some beauty in them but, n.o.p.e at the present.
Not a fan of invasive plants or animals either. Feral cats, house sparrows, starlings etc. but it isn’t like the myriapod who shall not be named from the last paragraph.
Tabanus sp. are uniquely obnoxious with their behavior of loud circling and dive-bombing around and at your head. They, Apis mellifera and mosquitoes are the ones that I have had to run away from.
Nothing that I would call a phobia, but cockroaches are definitely on my list of things I find very hard to like. If it is outside my house I usually feel ok with its existence, but the second something like a cockroach enters my house it’s game over.
…five winters ago, my sister and I found three trapped at the bottom of a waste-bin in our basement. We felt sympathetic: they probably just wanted to escape the cold. So we setup a makeshift tank with bedding and water. We intended to release them when the snow stopped.
When I went downstairs to checkup on them the next day, I found two of the mice on the farthest corners of the tank, covered in blood. What was left of the third mouse lied in the center of the tank… a bloody, disembowled husk with a missing head.
The imagery was extremely traumatic and I cannot look at them the same way.
My husband trapped a couple of deer mice (or whitefooted mice, who knows) and set them up in a nice little condo in a Rubbermaid tub (some food, a couple of places to hide, some bedding). He said he wanted to let me see them when I got home a couple of days later. They didn’t much like being captives and chewed their way right out of the box between 24 and 48 hours. I don’t think we caught them again…
Daddy long legs. I generally love spiders, and I know these are harmless, but they honestly just gross me out. In the same way that most people feel about roaches.
We had a live mouse trap in our garage, which is a seperate building from our house, so sometimes we forget to close the door at night. One day we opened the live trap and there were two dead mice in it with their heads bitten off. What kind of animal just beheads mice instead of eating the whole mouse?
I’ll be the odd one and respond that from the perspective of population genetics, domestic dog breeds are just plain atrocities. Really, anything domesticated by humans tends to get really messed up. Of course, I’m also the weird one who’s actually fond of wasps…
Ticks, chiggers, and roaches are of course on the list of cringe-factors as well.
I will agree with you when people breed dogs for certain aesthetic values and more-or-less breed the “dog” out of the dog. But I don’t agree that all domestic dogs are atrocities. I think working dogs aren’t as bad, genetically speaking, as other canine species.
though they are just pretty cute for something terrifying) but I’m hoping to eventually be where @tigerbb is!