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This is very interesting. Do you know if they have any interesting misconceptions about those animals they know about but have never seen (assuming you yourself know enough about rabbits, badgers, hares and such to know that they are misconceptions)? It's interesting when many people know about a certain phenomenon through media or things like cartoons, which obviously distort reality beyond any possibility of recognition. The most amazing example I've ever seen is the one about bullfights. Apparently, many Americans know about bullfights from a single Bugs Bunny sketch, in which he is dressed as a Matador and kinda "dances" with the bull in the arena. This apparently made many people think that that's basically what happens in a bullfight. Then you get some nasty culture shock when people watch the real thing, as in this reddit thread (WARNING: video with blood and violence against animals, first in CGI then in real life): https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/68i332/to_those_who... The comments were really surprising to me. I would expect most people from outside of Spain, Latin America and Portugal not to know about bullfights, but I definitely didn't expect people to know about it from a cartoon and harbor so many misconceptions about what it really is! Spoiler: in a bullfight, the matador does nasty things to the bull (like sticking short spears with hooks so that they don't come out when the bull moves), dodges the bull's charge while distracting it with a cape, and in the end he kills it with a sword through the back. If the killing blow fails to kill the bull, they kill the animal with a knife just below the brain. Also, Matador literally means killer in Spanish, because he kills the bull. |
Another misconception kids seem to have is about the hippopotamus, which is always depicted as a cute animal, but which in fact is one of the most dangerous animals around.