Animal phobias are strange. I don't have any. Except with regards to rats, but that only makes sense. When I was 15 or so, rats invaded our house.
I say invaded, but the sneaky rodents have a way of making themselves seem much more insidious than they actually are. In reality, there was probably just a happy family of rats trying to hack a living in the winter cold by taking shelter in the warmth of our attic -- feeding and breeding, as rats are wont to do. At first I didn't really notice them, and they didn't even bother me.
But then one night a rat got into my room, and I spent the better part of the pre-dawn gloom hunting the damn thing, though it always evaded me. The next day I decided to destroy them. And I did. Utterly. But going up into the attic to set those traps always filled me with an illogical fear, as though the rats were hunting me. I don't know exactly what I was afraid of, but I really didn't want one of them to touch me. To this day I'd sooner touch a rotting corpse than a living rat.
Animal phobias aren't logical, but at least I can back mine up with an evolutionary theory. I'm willing to bet that the rat-lovers of Middle-Age Europe experienced overwhelming negative selective pressures, strong enough no doubt to prune any branches in that direction of my own family tree. Hell, it was probably strong enough to uproot every tree thus inclined in the forest.
I think hatred of rats places me in a pretty enveloping pool of sympathizers, but it is by no means global. There are cultures that eat them, for God's sake. And though I'd have to be well-nigh on the way to starvation before I'd even consider it, I have to admit the diet makes more sense than my phobia. I mean, what a motto: If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.
I had a friend in high school who was afraid of frogs (there are also cultures that eat frogs). His reason: "I'm afraid they are going to jump on me." Jump on him. That just makes no sense at all. Of all the groups of animals to fear, Kermit's clan seems universally the least frightful. Or is it?
While you are pretty safe picking up any frog in this area (don't go licking them -- practically all amphibians produce toxins to one degree or another), there are frogs in South America that can kill you almost on contact. The much-acclaimed "poison-dart frogs" are for the most part overrated, but the golden-yellow phyllobates terribilis packs enough punch that just light contact with its skin to a mucous membrane means death, and fast.
Snakes get more than their share of shrieks and shudders -- I'd venture quite a few more than frogs. (That really is just ridiculous. Jumped on?) Somewhere between 10 and 12 people per year are killed by snakes in the United States, usually rattlesnakes. This number is three orders of magnitude greater in India, with the Indian cobra the ranking slayer, claiming, along with its venomous cohorts, 10-12,000 lives per year. As far as the U.S. is concerned, take a deep breath -- in comparison to the dozen or so snake deaths, on average 89 people are killed per year by lightning. For the love of God, though, don't walk barefoot in tall grass in India (note again here that we find cultures that utilize snakes for protein).
But here's the strange thing about animal phobias: while rats could theoretically carry plague or some god-awful virus, and touching a terribilis means death outright, I'm not really afraid of the disease, and my friend wasn't afraid of being poisoned. As an ophidiophobe doesn't fear venom -- but simply the look, the very idea of "snakeness" -- I don't like the nasty look of rats, and my friend didn't want to get jumped on. But even when we do see the logic of a phobia, it isn't compelling enough to draw us in. Which is nice. Fortunate, too, because if we based our phobias purely on logic, we'd all be petting rats and feeding them Alpo and trying desperately to trap dogs. There are millions of reports each year of dog attacks, mostly by pit bulls, rottweilers and other canid Frankensteins, with 18 people killed by dogs in 1990 in the United States. Rat attacks have been, for the most part, way down.
Here's a stranger thing about animal phobias, and if it doesn't tell us anything, I still think such things are interesting to consider. It just occurred to me, and it might help you next time you find yourself afraid of an animal to remember this limerick: Every animal that is feared, somewhere else as food is revered.
But I still hate rats.
