What animals make you cringe?

What animals make you cringe, either out of disgust, fear, or just annoyance?

For me:

  • Mosquitoes
  • Humans. Yes. Many humans are cringe.
  • Anything that creates tonnes of faeces. Eg. Rats, Crows
  • Maggots
  • Surinam toads. Those eggs give a crippling tryphobia °°
  • Monkeys, especially their blood-red rear-ends :(
  • The Brown Boobook: those eyes are creepy.
  • The Brown Fish Owl: absolutely disgusting
  • Marabou stork anyone?
  • Emu

:)

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When I was seventeen I had this extremely vivid nightmare about being bombarded and slowly devoured by black flies, so now I have this bizarre physical aversion to flies, mosquitos, and gnats. If one’s in the same room with me I absolutely cannot concentrate, and I get extremely on-edge and jumpy especially if they zoom past my ear or in front of my face. I encounter deer/horseflies much less frequently, but they still elicit the same reaction, especially when they’re attempting to bite.

Cockroaches have gotten to me pretty much my whole life, although probably for the same reasons they upset most other people. And ever since I first found a tick attached to me, I’ve also been very paranoid of them too.

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Any species invasive in my area.

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Parasites (endo- and ecto-).

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mosquito and snails I hase both, mosquito dont let me sleep in night, they play dirty game with me in which they hid in my matteresss and bite me. they go inside my nostrils at night buzzing at my ears. uufff I am in terror, and snails just ,they are so smashy smashy so you can understand

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rhesus macaque? bloody rear end?

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I’ve always been very grossed out by fish and moths. I think it’s the flappy-ness of both that bothers me. I dislike fish both in the water and as food.

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long slimy flatworms

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I love all animals, and go out of my way to find, catch, and “almost die” to a certainly unusual extent in search of them (ask anybody who knows me, even a lot of other like-minded naturalists). But the large, skinny-legged (Leiobunum spp.) harvestmen of Eastern North America have always creeped me out, along with Scutigeromorphs and some big, Tipulid craneflies. Anything with those thread-like, autotomous legs (that keep twitching after being detached) are just really unnerving to me. They’re totally harmless, and I don’t mind coexisting with them, love them, deeply respect their ecological roles and even pick them up/keep them in captivity, but at times I’d rather find a bear in my tent than a big wad of those leggy little dudes.

Once as a boy scout, I found a dead Imperial Moth by the latrine, so I brought it into the canvas tent I was staying in to hopefully salvage it to bring home to my collection. But in the middle of the night, I awoke to hundreds of “grandaddy long-legs” tearing it apart piece by little, fuzzy piece. I’ve never seen anything like that since, except for the mating congregations of the genus, but it certainly didn’t earn them more popularity in my eyes.

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Humans.

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Nelumbo Lutea: the yellow lotus. The receptacle with all of the holes freaks me out and makes me feel ill. It made me realize I have a mild case of Trypophobia: disgust patterns of holes!

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I don’t think it’s the best topic for a society that promotes love of nature.

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Sacrilege! Moths are the most wonderful life form on earth!
Seriously, although I know what maggots are, and appreciate them intellectually, they still kind of creep me out. Especially when there are huge numbers of them, and are in the garbage. Not much else bothers me, though.

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Well, let’s face it, not all of nature is really loveable. We all have our biases.

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While I agree, it is a topic raised by a user. Therefore it is appropriate. If people respond, that’s up to them. Some folks are phobic about some things (@nyssa_ogeche for example - by the way @nyssa_ogeche , welcome to the Forum!), which may or may not be rational to others.

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Calling owls disgusting doesn’t really fall under “not really loveable”.

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That’s why we have topics to fight with phobias (e.g. spiders), not topics for promoting them.

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Overcoming a true phobia is a long process best left to experts. On these threads, we can try, but rationality does not always trump emotions.

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I don’t think we need to force people to love everything, but that makes topics like https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-nope-response-on-social-media/1990 more relevant, now it’s like a cringe culture but with living organisms instead of people, I have nothing against thoughtful posts of why people get some reactions, but I can’t stand calling names for the sake of it (and we get enough of it e.g. on facebook, where people hate everything alive).

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Keep in mind that not all biases against certain species are individualistic. Some Native American cultures view owls as harbingers of death; others don’t. There are many reasons for why someone might have fear or disgust for a species. It’s not necessarily just unfamiliarity.

I knew a guy who had no problem handling venomous snakes but was totally freaked out by moths. I didn’t understand it and he couldn’t explain it.

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