If a cat kills a lactating prey mammal, do people really think that it will refuse the milk inside?
I guess as far as “dumbest myths” go: “Humans are the only species that drinks another species’ milk.” Um, no. A carnivoran, on killing a lactating prey animal, opening its belly, and finding milk inside, is unlikely to pass up that concentrated protein and fat.
this made me wonder about cross species nursing and nurturing in the wild. There are lots of instances of cats and dogs nursing foundlings of other species, so it seems like it must also happen in the wild on occasion. When i searched, several articles popped up about these admittedly rare instances of mothers adopting, and in some cases nursing, infants from other species. Here is one of the articles.
https://stacker.com/plants-animals/12-animals-have-been-observed-adopting-animals-other-species
I’m pretty sure your scenario above is the more common scenario for species drinking another species’ milk. But, I enjoyed reading some of the stories about nurturing bonds between different species (not all involving nursing).
Anyway, back to the topic at hand…
This stuff is making a comeback, sadly.
I’m not sure that it ever actually went away. 
To be fair, they are still really obnoxious birds
i grew up with horny toads that are actually lizards - and was told they spit blood
They do, actually. From their eyes, not their mouth, though. That’s one weird fact that’s (surprisingly) partly true!
I worked as a park interpreter for just over a year in a very rural, conservatively-minded area.
The one that takes the cake for me is the lady who was dead serious when she said “spiders are satanic”.
I cannot.
While searching for textbooks, i started seeing these recommendation/ads from Russia. From my cursory reading the short abstracts, the materials claim that Jesus coexisted with dinosaurs and tended them as well as sheep.
Many creationists believe that dinosaurs survived well into “Bible times”, though I’m not sure this would quite extent into the New Testament.
Well if Jesus can walk on water…
Aw! That’s actually pretty cute. Of course, dinosaurs were dead a long time before the first humans, but that picture of Jesus holding that baby dinosaur is still very adorable!
Here’s a photo I took of porcupine quills pinning a freshly fallen leaf onto a tree trunk. Someone who doesn’t know that this can happen from the porcupine whipping its tail around could see it and think that the porcupine “shot” its quills there.
Yes, I was told by several types of individuals about porcupines being able to shoot its quills at people.
Further reading, Google Lens and Translate yield ideas by the Russian Church:
Jesus deserved to love the last specimens of the animals going extinct
Discoveries of mammoths in Siberia show that Russia had other species present going extinct
One needs to have devotion/faith to accept the possibility that forces divine directed the extinct species to migrate to the Middle East for Jesus to love/pet them.
How weird. I bet park interpreters have all sorts of odd stories.
Here in Pennsylvania, it’s definitely belief in a self-sustaining wild mountain lion population that’s being covered up by a state government conspiracy. If you’re not from this part of the world, you might be shocked by how adamant people are about this. “I see mountain lions around here” is a personality trait, with whole online communities dedicated to people sharing their stories and opining on why the Pennsylvania Game Commission is covering up the truth- pretty much a bigfoot-hunter style community is the best comparison I can think of.
To be clear, I’m not talking about an occasional escaped pet puma (which is a thing) or a very rare occurrence of a stray mountain lion from the West (which did happen at least once, but the poor cat was caught repeatedly on trail cams and traffic cams before ultimately being killed on a road in Connecticut, collected, DNA-tested, and tracked to the Black Hills population, without any shadow government interference. Looks like it even made it onto iNat! warning: dead puma in observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8170860).
The conspiracy theory is either that the nittany lion never went extinct and the government knows about them being here but wants it to stay a secret so they don’t have to manage them, or a variation that the state government introduced them here and things went awry and now they cover up the continuing population to hide their horrible mistake.
Either way, the lack of roadkill specimens is because the government scoops them all up and hides them (“I saw a roadkill one on my way home from work one day and then by the evening it was disappeared by government agents!” say an army of people who somehow never thought to get a sample when they saw it lying there).
Trail cam images are shared ad nauseum on online forums which either clearly show house cats, show blob-cats with no identifying features, show actual mountain lions but never with any identifiable foliage around them to prove they were taken in the eastern USA, or straight up show a puma with ponderosa pine trees or mesquite in the pictures to make it clear that they weren’t taken anywhere near here.
I once asked someone with a “blob cat” pic who said “THIS THING WAS HUGE!!” to send me pictures of deer from the same trail cam and superimposed the two images to demonstrate that the cat was barely up to the deer’s knee height… the guy’s response? “That’s a baby mountain lion!”
If you suggest to an “eyewitness” that they might be mistaken about the size of a cat they saw, they give the “I KNOW WHAT I SAW” speech, tell you you’re a government-believing sheeple, and harumph back to their echo chamber of true believers. I honestly think it’s both one of the weirdest and most pointless conspiracy theories ever, but it’s also a fascinating study of the power of motivated reasoning, the fallibility of human memory, confirmation bias, and radicalization through internet echo chambers.
I teach in a public school, and I honestly think I’d get in less trouble for questioning a student’s religion than I would for saying “your dad probably didn’t really see a mountain lion”.
So that’s my favorite local animal myth- one spread not by simple ignorance but by active evangelizing from a small group of people for whom the myth is very, very real.
I actually thought this was true for a while!
This kind of thing is a common phenomenon around the world. It occurs throughout the eastern US, but there are similar groups claiming to regularly see large cats (with similar government conspiracies) in the UK and Australia. It probably occurs in other places, too.
Ive seen a horse fly
Ive seen a house fly
Ive seen a bat fly
Ive seen a dragon fly
Ive seen a deer fly
Ive even seen my punctuation fly away
Ive never seen an elephant fly