How Opossums Hissed Their Way Into Our Hearts
How these ‘ugly-cute’ animals are a beacon of light on a dark timeline
The humble Virginia Opossum has always been nature’s unsung hero, but now it’s the patron saint of anxious people everywhere, thanks to a PR overhaul from the internet.
Let’s address the obvious first: There’s a significant amount of people who (falsely) believe opossums are, for lack of a better term, ugly. Hideous, in fact.
My own mother is still scarred by a childhood run-in with an opossum who fell to the bottom of her neighbor’s empty pool.
“It was screaming and hissing,” she recalled to me. “My neighbors used my jump rope to lasso it out of the pool and it was going nuts everywhere, just disgusting. Horrible teeth. [Hissing noises.]”
“I was like, fuck, this is the scariest thing ever.”
But it seems many people are ready to give these mischievous marsupials a second chance. Over the last few years, opossums have inspired countless meme pages across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. One such page, possumcore, has nearly 234,000 followers.
“I think opossums are misunderstood because they aren’t sweet and friendly,” Sage Stargrove, a social media strategist who used to care for opossums, told me…
