The Story Behind That Famous Opossum Poster

The public radio show This American Life did an episode exploring the theme of whether most people are basically good (or not). The first guest was Jessica Williamson, who, some years ago, made the poster above about a found cat. You've seen the poster, but what you don't know is that in the original version, Williamson included her real phone number. She distributed the poster around her neighborhood, but never thought about someone posting it on the internet. As you can imagine, she got a lot of phone calls.

And then when I started listening to the voicemails, it was kind of like this very unscientific, I would say, social experiment. Because you could really lock the calls into three groups. And the largest group of people were actually very kindly just calling to tell me that it wasn't a cat and that it was a possum.

Williamson estimated that maybe 20% of the calls were playing along with the joke and claimed it was their cat, and another 10% were calling to tell her she is an idiot. Of course, this slice of humanity only involves those who went to the trouble of actually calling the number. You can listen to the eight-minute segment, which includes excerpts of the actual calls she received, or read the transcript here. Or listen to the whole episode if that interests you.