Today we found a male stag beetle in the house…absolutely beautiful animal. I insistedon moving it outside, and I learned that a female has been killed by my stepfather last night. My over-imaginative mind pictures the male desperately climbing into the house to find his beloved wife. Anyway, I don’t understand why people kill animals needlessly…especially harmless ones like stag beetles that eat friggin’ tree sap.
Because I have an evil mind, this brings to mind a Snopes story about Ted Nugent.
When asked about the last thoughts of a deer in the sights of a hunter, Nugent said, “They’re only interested in three things: the best place to eat, having sex and how quickly they can run away. Much like the French.”
At least they got their priorities right.
I’m with you,**Lama Pacos… I really try to escort any insects out of territory; even wasps are pretty easy to remove to fly outside with the old cup and paper method.
To me , it’s always worth the effort to appreciate a creature’s life, and help it, no matter how small. In that light, unless you are amazingly blessed with certain sight, you’ll go crazy if you think about the ramifications too much. For my mind, I try to do the best I can, and try to never kill anything without thinking of the creature’s life.
I anthropomorphosize (sp?) insects. If they’re cute, I let them live. If they’re scary looking, they’re gone. The ones I find inside, that is. I figure the outdoors belongs to them, and I let outdoor bugs be.
I don’t go out of my way to kill the scary ones though. It’s only if they get close. My house, my rules. Had a centipede crawl up my pants leg once. He broke the rules.
I agree wholeheartedly. 99.9% of the time, I will escort an insect or spider outdoors instead of killing it. Here is one exception: a house centipede. These used to frequent my apartment and they got blasted with bug spray. The other exception is mosquitoes. Those bastards deserve to die.
Auntie Pam, here’s a case where I have to speak up: I always thought it was normal to wholeheartedly appreciate every living thing in it’s own right, very much thanks to my professor biologist stepdad. I can’t imagine life otherwise; I don’t view critters as human-like at all, in fact, it’s the appreciation of their distinct traits and life outside human parameters that makes them so interesting to me. I like me an ugly bug!
Yes, I don’t kill even insects I’m terrified of. I have a fairly strong phobia of spiders and cockroaches, but I always go to the effort to peaceably remove them (which is very difficult when you’re too scared to get within a foot of the damn thing).
One that really gets me is when people kill ants. Ants are particularly close to my heart among insects.
And those are the only ones I kill on sight. When they’re in the house, anways. They get into the catfood dishes and sting my kitties. I can’t have that!
Scorpions, black widows, potato bugs, and vinegaroons are always catch and release though. I let the normal brown spiders stay; when their webs look abandoned and wispy, I clean 'em up for the next guest. I’m sitting on my bed now and I can see…6 spider webs. I love the little guys (gals).
I brake for amphibians.
I gladly and remorselessly kill 'em all. From the smallest bacterium to the largest hairest human, if you’re in my home uninvited you life is in a dire position.
the way I see it, I’m acting as the hand of Darwin. The more insects I kill who enter my home the more it encourages the natural selection favoring those insects who prefer to not dwell in my comfy abode.
My rule is if it’s an insect it deserves to die. I know for a fact they have no qualms biting me if they could, it will either be me or them. One of us has to go.
I’ll kill cockroaches in my house (and we seem to have a problem with them in our kitchen), and wasps that build nests above the doors and buzz around belligerently. Other than that, I have a “live and let live” policy with most insects. I think I would freak out if I found scorpions or huge spiders in my house (I’m talking palm of your hand-and-outstretched fingers-sized spiders), but so far I haven’t found any of those.
Whenever a bat gets into the museum, I insist on being the one to catch it. The others kill them. I wrap the poor things in a towel and take them outside. I don’t understand why people are so afraid of them. They’re just little flying mousies. (Yeah, some of them have rabies, but so do some dogs.)
Speaking of mice, I’ve always insisted on live traps to catch them. I then drive them to the national park nearby and release them there. Poor little fellas are just trying to make a living. It’s not their fault they’re mice.
I discovered the hard way that glue traps are not live traps. I had pictured the mous getting his little feet stuck, with me quickly and neatly extracting him for release. To my horror, I couldn’t free the poor little guy once I caught him, and had to come up with a way to kill him instantly and painlessly. Hubby suggested the mircrowave, which I instantly vetoed as not only painful, but potentially messy. He suggested drowning, but that’s painful, as is suffocation. He refused my idea of putting the mouse in a bag in the freezer, giving him a relatively painless demise from hypothermia. So, we ended up squishing him behind the car tire. At least it was quick.
Around this time, I discovered that my sweet, gentle grandmother is a cold-blooded killer. I didn’t know she had it in her. She was over at my house where we were cleaning out the cupboards because of the mouse I caught in the glue trap when one of the mouse’s friends announced his presence by making a run for it. He jumped into the cabinet beneath the stove, but couldn’t get back out because of the high, slippery sides. Before I could even blink, my grandmother grabbed a can of vegetables and bashed the poor thing to death with the can. No pity has she.
I’m not so generous with bugs, I have to admit, but I kill them quickly and painlessly. However, anything with fur stirs my sympathy.
I’m kinda the same way – I’ll try and usher whatever insects find their way into my place back out into their native territory. I do have four exceptions though:
-
Roaches. I haven’t had many in all the places I’ve lived, but as the universally loathed house pest, their deaths are inevitable and swift.
-
House centipedes, as above. They’re swift and slippery little buggers that are impossible to corral onto a sheet of paper or dustpan long enough to take outside – they’ll skitter off their mobile perch to parts unknown long before that. And you can’t pick them up due to their soft bodies and myriad legs. So, the wad of paper towel and the toilet it is.
-
Fruit flies. I have an unnatural and abiding hatred for fruit flies. Especially in the less … um … dilligent supermarkets where their produce section is swarming with them. ::shudder::
-
Mosquitoes. Indoors or out, they must die. Period. End of story. (Besides just about everyone’s loathing of these wee beasties, the risk of West Nile virus also adds a very good reason to swat these bastages before they bite.)
Intellectually, I agree with all the pro-ugly bug people. But my irrational fear of creepy-crawlies overrides my understanding of the important part these little fuckers play. I kill all bugs that are in my house or look like they want to be on me. You don’t want to be around when I go into Bug Hysteria Mode. It’s downright embarrassing.
I take that back. I don’t kill ladybugs or box elder bugs. Everyone else has a bull’s eye on their back.
Most bugs get a free pass from me. But let them try to bug my horse, and it’s death death DEATH!!! Deerflies, mosquitos – I spray without pity. Horse flies, monsters of the fly world, with a bite whose sudden sharp fire can make a horse buck wildly – they DIE. Fortunately they’re sluggish, so it’s relatively easy to slap them to a pulp when they land. Greenheads? A pox on the vicious razor-mouths!
Ladybugs, moths, butterflies, cute bugs? They’re okay by me.
If I catch a mouse (and we get quite a few here in our Little House In The Big Woods), I’ll let it go. If the cats get it, see ya, mousie!
I was pretty much taught to live and let live, but there are exceptions. Cockroaches for one–they die.
With spiders it varies. I’m actually more likely to let big, scary looking spiders live than I am the little brown ones because the big ones impress me. Black widows get the pass if they are outdoors and in an area where I’m not likely to encounter them. The ones that come indoors get weeded out of the gene pool.
Likewise mice that come indoors die regardless of how cute they are or how they’re just trying to survive or whatever. If they are outdoors I let the neighbors’ cats handle them.