buggirl: Little Black Widow I caught today for a video I’m…
Little Black Widow I caught today for a video I’m making about my research. I shall name this one Linda.
Largely as a result of reading the research into How Badly You Have to Scare a Black Widow to Get Her to Actually Bite You, and then thinking about that research, I had a moral dilemma the other day.
Back story: I used to be pretty arachnophobic. My biggest freak out came late one night on a graveyard dispatch shift for a private security company, when I was alone in the dispatch center and a really big spider (like, only slightly short of tarantula-sized) crawled onto my shoulder without my realizing it, and I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye and freaked the fuck out.
But a girlfriend who thought spiders were cute and adorable and liked nothing more than letting a tarantula crawl on her arm, and then about 30 years of steady work at observing and trying to better appreciate spiders, including being the designated spider-wrangler when a cobweb spider had set up housekeeping in the shower and needed to be removed, got me to the point where I can observe, and even handle (at need) a spider without there being a lot of drama.
But I drew the line at black widows. When finding them in the woodpile or the corners of my messy garage, I continued to kill them. It would elevate my heart rate and make me feel squeamish and guilty, but I’d do it.
Two days ago, though, while putting my bike away in the garage, I saw one. It was an adult female, hanging out on a cobweb in the front spokes of my wife’s bike, against which I normally lean my own. She was shiny black, and I leaned in closer to confirm, and yeah, red hourglass.
And I hesitated. The knowledge that she almost certainly was not going to bite a human unless very strongly provoked, to the point of actually putting her in legitimate fear for her own life, made me feel like killing her would be a morally questionable act. And I was okay with the idea that I could make that call for myself. But I also was pretty sure that my wife would disagree, and would argue that letting that spider continue to live in our garage, with the corresponding increased risk of a member of our family being accidentally bitten, outweighed the moral qualms I was feeling.
And those competing concerns were pretty evenly balanced in my mind, such that I actually stepped away for a minute to think about what I should do. And it’s embarrassing to admit, but one consideration that also factored into my thinking was this: if I _didn’t_ kill the spider, I was morally obligated to tell Linda where I’d seen it so she’d be forewarned about it being there. And that would mean I’d also have to either admit that I’d chosen to let it live (which was a decision I wasn’t looking forward to defending to her), or lie to her that I’d tried and failed to kill it (which would have crossed a different moral line I wasn’t interested in crossing).
So having thought through all this, I’d reluctantly come to the conclusion that I probably was going to kill it. And so I walked back to where I’d seen the spider and… she’d retreated out of sight into the clutter behind the bikes.
So I didn’t do anything. (And significantly, I didn’t tell Linda about it. Which, as I write this now, I think I need to fix.)
So. I don’t think anyone else will necessarily understand or approve of my mental contortions over all this. But seeing this image reminded me of it, and I wanted to share. If anyone has bothered to read this far, I’m interested in hearing your opinion.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/Wof39e.
Tags: insects, insects anonsally will never see, not at all an insect in this case, but an image she probably very much does NOT want to see, spiders, black widows.
