It's probably easier to talk about it if you've done a little imperative programming and can grasp OOP as a solution to actual problems, rather than just some abstract nonsense.
Yes, I think this is a real distraction. This Cat/Dog/Animal trope leads to the view that you should use classes to model your domain objects. In some cases, you should. But this can cause as many problems as it solves, and should not (IMO) be the default approach.
In getting away from this view, I've found it helpful to think of most programming as designing DSL's. To that end, you can use OO to build the infrastructure necessary to support this. But I worked in OO languages for many years before grokking that.