When asked to envision a frog, most people imagine a little green creature at a pond, sitting still on its four legs on a lily pad. With unblinking round yellow eyes on top of its head, croaking, waiting for its next meal to fly by, some might even say that frogs are kind of cute.
Though cute to some, to others, frogs are anything but adorable—frogs are their worst nightmare, like Freddie Cougar to the kids of Elm Street. Ye Seur Kim, a sophomore at SF State, remembers the exact moment she became ranidaphobic, which is person afraid of frogs.
Her big, brown eyes open bigger when someone mentions frogs. It’s as if talking about the amphibian is a torture. She tells the tale of how she saw a frog in the middle of a road hit by cars when she was seven in Korea. “All of a sudden, a car hit the frog and the head got decapitated, but it still kept on twitching. After that, I cannot look at frogs anymore,” Kim said.
Rebekah Gunter, a 911 dispatcher who lives in Indiana, also had a traumatizing incident with a frog when she, as a little girl, lived in southern Florida, where small, slimy tree frogs were abundant. Gunter recalls how her two older brothers, with the help of their friends, beat a large bullfrog to death with sticks until its guts came out. They then decided to put the frog in her shoes during the middle of the night. She was four years old. “In the darkness, this little girl imagines that these shoes are the relatives of the murdered frog and have come to attack her,” she says.
To both women, ever since those traumatizing events, both events left an aversion of frogs. Gunter says, “If I saw a frog on the side walk, I would walk through a mud puddle to avoid coming close to the amphibious one.”
Kim expresses similar feelings for the cold-blooded creatures. “They are ugly, slimy, [and] jump around as if their going to jump on top of my head,” she says, shuddering. “They look like a disease.”
Psychological traumas directly affect people who are ranidaphobic, but negative myths, such as frogs carrying warts and other diseases, only fuel the misconstrued perception of the little animal to the public.
In fact, frog warts are not contagious. Humans get warts because of human viruses, according to a website called allaboutfrogs.org. The “slime” on frogs is to protect their skin from drying up, and their skin is bumpy to help them camouflage themselves from predators. Some frogs are poisonous, but their poison serves as a survival mechanism. Some frogs might irritate people who mistakenly touch them because of the paratoidal glands that secretes the poison
Frogs didn’t always have a bad reputation. Throughout civilization, frogs were a prestigious, divine creature with great powers in fertility, regeneration, and rebirth, according to the Exploratorium website. In Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican tribes and Aymara tribes from Peru and Bolivia, frogs were the rain spirit mainly because frogs live in water. The tribes believed that by duplicating the images of the small animals, it would make the spirits cry. If no rain fell, even with images of frogs surrounding them, they would also blame the frog for drying up the heaven’s tears.
The ancient Chinese symbolized frogs with reproduction. The frog was associated as the women’s yin to the men’s yang—an absolute completion when put together.
In ancient Egypt, frogs were associated with the midwife goddess Heqit, who was ruler of conception (fertility) and birth. Women would wear amulets in the shape of a frog, in hopes to enlist the goddess for good luck. Egyptians saw frogs in a positive light possibly because many frogs would appear each year during the flooding of the Nile River, which was crucial for an agricultural survival.
Due to the abundance of frogs and their necessity for water, just like humans, Egyptians firmly believed in the divine power of the frogs.