Beyond the Book: Don't Be Scared of Them

 Have you had an encounter with a baby wild animal? 

Back when I went to zoos I sometimes saw baby wild animals. I thought they were all so cute, and I loved watching their antics. However, as time went by I started to dislike zoos. The idea of wild animals spending their lives in cages when they should be free made me feel bad. It’s been a long time since I went to one. Some treat the animals okay, but conditions in some places would freeze your blood. 

My latest encounter with a wild animal came a few years ago. We were sitting on the deck watching the dogs play when all at once they went berserk. We could see a small animal running in front of them. It vanished into a small pipe. The dogs ran from one end of the pipe to another, but they couldn’t get to the animal.

We put the dogs in the house and ran to see what was in the pipe. We tilted it, and a small adorable possum fell out. He was so brave! He hissed at us, but when we didn’t run, he fell over and pretended to be dead. What a clever boy. We didn’t try to touch him, and after we went away he jumped up ran. It was so nice to see a baby! I’ll have to admit that the adults are a bit on the ugly side, but a possum will not harm you. If you grabbed one it would probably try to bite you, but in general they want to be left alone. Actually, people sometimes make pets of them. There was a few domesticated possums that have their own Facebook page.

Should you kill one if you see it? No. Possums eat garden pests, snakes, and small rodents as well as bugs and ticks that cause lyme disease. An adult possum eat eat as many as 5,000 ticks per year. It’s almost impossible for a possum to get rabies too. Besides that, possums are like little sanitation engineers. They eat rotten things and keep the environment cleaner.

So did I convince you to tolerate a possum? My son shivers when he sees one.