It’s the spiders own damned fault! If they didn’t look so hideous, they wouldn’t get squished so often.
I mean, c’mon, 8 legs, 8 eyes, creepy-crawly ambulation and a face only a blind, comatose mother could love. What were they thinking? If you’re going to go around looking like that, stay away from humans. Most of us are gonna squish you for being that ugly.
I don’t squish spiders. I catch and release. Well, I catch, pull off 4 legs and release. I figure I’m doing them a favor, leaving them with a more attractive, mammalian type limb structure. They don’t do that creepy skittering motion anymore, either. They kind of walk like a dog wearing shoes for the first time—rather cute.
Scientists need to put “finding a cure for cancer” on the back burner and concentrate on genetically engineering spiders to be more attractive. 2 eyes, 4 limbs, bunny ears and kitten faces. Nobody’s going to squash a bug that looks like that! Give them a tail, too; they can use it to help spin their webs (which should be pink, like cotton candy).
Disclaimer: I don’t really pull the legs off spiders.
I freely admit to being slightly arachnophobic, but make no apologies. I don’t destroy webs or kill spiders that I see in my yard - and there are usually many. But if they are in my house they get squashed. Not just spiders, but most creepy-crawlies that enter my domain. They would do the same with me if the size difference was reversed.
I catch and release, but on a frigid day, is that really a kindness? I don’t just let them hole up in my apartment because I don’t like spider bites any more than I like mosquito bites.
The one time I would have squished a spider without compunction was way back when black widow spiders liked our garage. I was driving to the store with my infant son in his car seat when I saw a black widow dangling from the rearview mirror, flaunting its little red hourglass. It dropped onto the truck floor. I quickly turned out of traffic but couldn’t find it. It was a long, tense ride home, what with me doing visual spider scans of my baby every few moments. Never did find the sucker.
This is completely new to me; and lessens my admiration for spiders, a little bit. I’d never have imagined them being drawn to boat-related environments; thought that they had no use for the wet, in general. (Though – bathtubs, I suppose…)
That cuts both ways, though. In such a situation, spiders are endangered along with all the rest; and one doesn’t want to be killing members of an endangered species .
Though too much insistence on differentiating between the sexes in this matter, can mislead and indeed offend: I get the impression that arachnophobia in various degrees, is something-like equally divided between men and women. My long-time girlfriend was completely cool with spiders (any kind, any size), whereas I’m rather uneasy around them, particularly if they’re big; with the two of us, she took care of spider-shifting when needed. It is exactly the same, with my cousin and his wife.
Impression received also (just my own vague observations – nothing scientific): quite a large proportion of the female population in general, have a loathing of snakes; but that applies to definitely a minority of males. It is / was thus with both couples mentioned above: with her, a truly high degree of phobia concerning snakes – whereas re him, an outright fondness for snakes. (At all events, in Britain snake encounters in-the-wild are not much of an issue.)
I do confess to more than a little bit of tongue-in-cheek in my post. However, it is the case that the only arachnophobic people I know are women, and the only true snake phobic people (phobic, as opposed to mere ugly feelings upon watching the slither) are one man and one woman.
I worked hard to reduce the symptoms of spider phobia when I lived in the infested house. Doing research on spiders, forcing myself to look at photos of them while breathing slow, deep breaths, and using other techniques for treating phobias. I still don’t like them, but I got so I didn’t freak out, either.
I’m female and my husband is afraid of spiders. I’ve scooped many a spider out of the shower because he was afraid to go in there.
He’s an arachnophobe but at least he isn’t a gleeful murderer like so many on this thread. Although female arachnophobes are more apt to scream and act like a baby, male arachnophobes are just insanely cruel and then brag about it. How is that better?
If spiders are in the house I just leave them be, they are doing no harm. I vacuum up cobwebs for tidiness though. They have to remake them. But webs aren’t useful to spiders if they’re dusty so I’m not destroying their livelihood.
A spider inside the house gets killed immediately. Don’t care one bit what you think of that. Anything outside is not bothering me but inside, nope. You’re dead.
I am very much an arachnophobe, though I react a little milder than I used to. I have also evolved into being more compassionate towards them, and do not go on killing sprees anymore. Though I have killed a couple accidentally when they scampered upon my body and I flung them off rather aggressively, where they promptly went squish.
I live in Australia, land of huge deadly hairy long-leggedy beasties, and despite this spiders are a rare sight in the home.
In 1995 this boy from PacNW was driving a Humvee on a tank road in the woodsy part of Ft. Benning, GA. I was going maybe 25 mph or so. I saw some movement out the corner of my eye on the embankment maybe 10 feet to my left that only registered in my brain as “do not want!” I bring my vehicle to a stop and back up. I point at the hillside and says to my passenger (a native of Georgia), “Mitch, what the hell is that?” “Oh, that? That’s a wolf spider.” It’s just as well we didn’t have any grenades with us. We carried on with the journey–which involved 5 days/4 nights in the woods with those abominations. I slept on the hood of the Humvee.
And more than once I’ve been alerted to a large house spider walking across plastic. About as loud as a mouse, but the footfalls are all wrong. The horror…
Truly terrifying are the Haitian zombie spiders. Their preferred method of attack is to hook their back legs onto your eyebrow, and then swing down and plonk their fangs into your eyeball. From there it’s a short trip to burrow into your skull where they eat your brains and shit.
Wow, I feel weird. I’ve got 16 tarantulas, including a 9 1/2" Burgundy Goliath Birdeater (Theraphosa stirmi) and a Pinkfoot Goliath Birdeater (Theraphosa apophysis) with the same potential size (both can reach 11 inches). Five are hot Old World species (India and Africa) and the rest are Latin American. They range from black, orange, purple, blue, and gold.
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