Many people think opossums are hideously ugly. My wife is one of them. I tell her opossums are cute! She says, ‘You think everything is cute! Like those enormous raccoons!’ (She thinks the raccoons up here are entirely too big, compared to the ones she’s used to.)
Personally, I think opossums are cute – not to mention useful. They can eat 5,000 ticks in a season. (Not that we have a tick problem here.) They’re like tick magnets, and they’re fastidious in their grooming, so they eat a lot of them. And they’re very, very unlikely to carry rabies. The sharp teeth and hissing? Mostly a bluff.
So how about it? Do you think opossums are cute, or ugly? ‘So ugly they’re cute’ counts as ‘cute’.
Possums are one of the ugliest common animals out there. The only thing that outranks them in that regard are armadillos on the half-shell (southern road kill) and nutria. Even the healthy possums look like they have a fresh case of the mange. Why couldn’t we get one of the cool marsupials like a koala or wallaby like Australia has? Oh well, alligators are more fun to party with than salt water crocodiles any day so it isn’t a total loss.
Ugly. Almost aggressively ugly. They always look bristly and bitey. Even the babies are only marginally cute and that’s only because we’re genetically disposed to find baby features cute. I can appreciate the little ones hanging onto mom as “neat” but it doesn’t warm my heart.
As other said, that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate them for their place in nature. We have one that hangs out in our backyard at night (not in the garbage cans either, just roams the yards) and he’s welcome to do his thing. He just looks ugly while doing it.
Adorably cute. My dog jumped one in our yard, which promptly played dead. So I brought my dog inside and hunched over it for a while as it continued to play dead. Every minute or so, it would open and eye and look around, see me looking back, then blink it shut and give a fresh new ‘death spasm’ to try and fool me.
