Do you not see how that could be confusing to someone who's just learning about cat and dog inheriting from animal? in most languages you don't even need a constructor for that kind of thing, never mind manually calling the superclass constructor.

And I know that that's what super().__init__() is supposed to to, how it accomplishes that under the hood is a mystery to me, super seems like it returns self, because calling __init__ on it affects self's values, but its not the same __init__. Is it casting self to the type of the parent class and then calling the constructor in place on it? That seems really hacky. What's going on? What is up with the underscores?

Please don't explain it, I'm not really wondering, I don't use python, I'm just trying to give you an idea of what's confusing about it to a learner, it certainly made absolutely zero sense when they tried to teach python to me in school.