This. 1,000,000% this.
I think there’s enough negative stigmas attached to owls to qualify them as scary.
as for bugs, unlike a tiger which has the same number of features that you do (give or take a tail), bugs have six to our four limbs, and five to or meager two eyes. spiders are even more alien with eight limbs and eight eyes.
And their skeleton is…is…on the OUTSIDE! yech!
And yet, many people are afraid of mice, too.
I love this ! Am moved to give a quote expressing a thought along similar lines – comparing the same things, but in the other direction. It concerns a wilder part of Europe, than France: comes from a long-ago travel book by Jan and Cora Gordon, about their experiences in the 1920s of the then new state of Yugoslavia. They had travelled to Sarajevo by the long narrow-gauge rail route which in those days ran southward to that city, out of Croatia.
They write: “The engine, a strange-looking construction… was running back along a parallel line. Topped by a fat bonneted funnel, with tiny wheels and an elaboration of complex and ingenious external machinery, it made one think of some illustration of African entomology, one of those long-legged beetles of the Congo, for it moved with a ridiculous agitation of mobile members compared with the visible motion achieved.”
I am extremely allergic to any type of bug bite. I break out in huge itchy welts that expel yellow liquid, pus, and blood before they crust over. Of course I’m scared of bugs.
From the bug’s viewpoint - If you had to live where there were big monsters walking around who outweighed you by about a million to one, wouldn’t you evolve a strategy to scare the hell out of the monsters?