Animals & Creatures · 23 entries
Animal Phobias
The largest group in the catalogue and the oldest. Fear of spiders, snakes and dogs is documented across every continent and every century that kept records, and the animal type is one of the five DSM-5-TR uses to sort specific phobia. It is also the group where the argument about origin is liveliest: whether these fears are learnt in a lifetime or inherited across many.
The filing rule here is the creature itself. A fear of the sensation an animal produces, feathers or fur by texture rather than by animal, is a sensory fear and files there instead. What that leaves is a group where the commonest terms carry real literature and the rarest carry almost none: arachnophobia is called one of the commonest anxiety disorders on record, while the fear of the great mole rat has six words in an encyclopedia and a collection of quotations that all use it as a joke. Every entry below says which of those two it is.
In this category
All 23 animal phobias
23 entries
- Fear of AnimalsWhat predicts fear of an animal is perceiving it as dangerous, disgusting and uncontrollable. Whether anything ever happened to the person does not.
- Fear of AntsBoth forms of this fear take the colony as their object, not the insect. The only study attached to the word tested clips from the Ant-Man films.
- Fear of BatsThe paper carrying the word in its title argues the fear is too narrow: almost entirely about rabies, when the list of bat-borne viruses runs to several dozen.
- Fear of BeesApiphobia is a fear of the sting rather than the insect, and the one phobia whose diagnosis can be settled by an allergy test. What the record holds on it.
- Fear of BirdsBirds cannot be avoided, so this fear ends in closed windows and car-only travel. The reference that classifies it also states that nobody has counted it.
- Fear of CatsAilurophobia is uncommon as animal phobias go, and no survey has ever measured it. Five spellings, one documented case treated with a kitten, and a word collision.
- Fear of ChickensThe one published case, an eighteen-year-old woman in India, appeared in 2017 in a report saying nobody had described the condition before.
- Fear of CockroachesThe cockroach beat the snake and the spider on unpleasantness in a rating study, and it had been missing from the standard image sets researchers use.
- Fear of DogsSixty-two million pet dogs in the United States alone, and every prevalence figure for this fear was collected in a clinic rather than in the street.
- Fear of DucksGary Larson invented it for a Far Side cartoon in 1988. It now has a medical-information page contributed by a physician, with a synonym list.
- Fear of FishOne conditioning demonstration, one televised case, and a people described as phobic for a century before the label was withdrawn. What the record on fish fear holds.
- Fear of FrogsA published 1983 case describes a woman whose extreme fear dated from the afternoon her mower went over a group of frogs and killed them.
- Fear of HorsesFreud's Little Hans is still the reference point for this fear, and the article that cites treatment studies names none. What the record actually holds.
- Fear of InsectsAlmost nobody fears insects; they fear cockroaches, or wasps, or moths. The one figure in circulation, six per cent, is credited to a book Wikipedia never names.
- Fear of Mice and RatsMusophobia, murophobia, suriphobia: three languages for one fear, a DSM-5 classification, a patron saint, and no clinical study under any spelling.
- Fear of PigsHitchens coined porcophobia in 2007 to pair with porcophilia. The pork taboo still has no settled explanation, ecological, medical or arbitrary.
- Fear of ReptilesWikipedia's list of feared reptiles ends with dinosaurs, which tells the reader what this fear is not organised around. No statistics exist under the term.
- Fear of SharksTwo reference works define galeophobia as two unrelated animals. The clinical record is empty; what exists is a decade of newspaper coverage and a film from 1975.
- Fear of SnakesOne pairing conditions it permanently and Mineka's macaques had to be shown. The third of adults said to fear snakes has no survey behind it.
- Fear of SpidersWikipedia puts arachnophobia at 3.5 to 6.1 per cent of the world and names no survey. What its account of the fear does and does not support.
- Fear of StingsCnidophobia is used for bee stings, but its root is the phylum name for jellyfish and sea anemones. No word exists for the fear of jellyfish.
- Fear of the Great Mole RatZemmiphobia names a fear of an animal with no settled common name, and every published use of the word is a joke about phobia lists.
- Fear of WaspsWikipedia calls it relatively common and gives it three sentences. The best account of how it starts is a gardening book about wasps inside split fruit.
Keep going
The other categories
- Social & InterpersonalFears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them.
- The Body, Illness & DeathDeath, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself.
- Abstract & ExistentialFailure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
Common questions
Questions about animal phobias
What is the most common animal phobia?
Arachnophobia is the one named first almost everywhere, and the range quoted for it, 3.5 to 6.1 per cent of the world's population, names no survey, no year and no sample size. Fear of dogs has a stronger claim to being lived with rather than merely reported, because the trigger is kept as a pet in the tens of millions and walked through the places everyone else uses.
Are animal phobias recognised as a diagnosis?
The animal type is one of the five specific phobia types DSM-5-TR uses, so an animal fear can be diagnosed. The individual word usually cannot. A clinician meeting a fear of wasps would code a specific phobia of the animal type rather than spheksophobia, which is why most of the terms filed here are labelled documented or coined rather than recognised.
Why are spiders feared more than more dangerous animals?
Because the reaction is not proportional to the danger, which is the property that makes it a phobia in the first place. Antje Gerdes and colleagues found in 2009 that spiders provoke fear and disgust out of proportion to other arthropods, and the fear of bees runs the other way: it is described as less common than fear of spiders while the encounter rate runs the opposite direction.
What is the fear of all animals called?
Zoophobia, and it is filed here as a studied term rather than a recognised one. It names a general aversion rather than a diagnosis, and in practice the clinical literature works with the specific animal a person actually avoids.