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Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
What I didn't know was that many animals won't eat opossums, possibly because of the smell.
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They may seem too "alien" to animals (even snakes) used to dealing only with placental mammals. There are at least 125 million years between us. Opossii very rarely catch or carry rabies, for example, even though almost all placental mammals can. They aren't dirty animals, though-- they groom themselves almost as obsessively as a cat, though they lick and comb with their back feet, not their front. (The rabies factoid is from Google, the grooming one from personal observation.) Another observation-- and this might have been a quirk of the possum I was watching and not the species in general-- it blinked only one eye at a time, staggered over several seconds, so it always had one eye open.
Your anecdote reminds me of another encounter I had. I dug up an e-mail I wrote to someone about it afterward and am pasting it below:
I walk out onto my front porch tonight at around 9:30, and there on top of the railing (around chest height) sits an adult possum. So of course I do the sane thing any rational person would do and immediately pick it up. Take it by the tail, bring it in to show my grandmother ("yep, another one") who of course has seen me handling possums so often that it deserved and received no more reaction than if I had picked up a fallen leaf (one can get jaded to cat-sized holdouts from the Mesozoic hanging around your house quite easily.) Possum was trying to climb my clothes, so I took it back outside, sat it down, and it ran away.
The thing about possums is that they are dumb. So dumb that they seem to be incapable of making the mental connection between the fact that for some reason they are hanging in the air by their tail and the giant animal beside them. The typical reaction you get is not hostility, but an appearance of mild annoyance and confusion. They will try to climb anything in reach while you hold them, and if nothing is in reach, they climb themselves (at least the small ones, don't know if adult ones retain the flexibility.) They will bend upwards, grab the base of their own tail, and then climb it hand over hand. Then, when they reach the hand that is holding them, they just climb on top of your hand. No sign that they make the cognitive leap that would be made by a rat or just about anything else that if they bite this thing holding their tail, it might let go. I figure that, if I had let it, this possum would simply have climbed my clothes to my shoulder, possibly climbed my head, and never once realized that "biting" might have some utility.
I sometimes think about the possums that I've caught when they are small, then later catch medium ones, then larger ones, then adult ones-- I'm sure some of them are repeat customers. And it has been happening for possum generations. In local possum folklore, I must be the beast that goes bump in the night that possums see in their nightmares. Generations of possums warn their young that if they don't behave, then I will get them.
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In fact, after making eye contact, you begin to think they're rather cute.
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http://www.googlyfoogly.com/pictures/Cute-Possum.html