Creepy crawling, crafters of the world
Spiders are wonderful, helpful, and beautiful beings.
We hate them, due in part, to an inherent visceral response to sensing a creepy crawler. It’s a case of overkill when faced with our uncertainty because spiders do feature a few rare venomous varieties. Yet most are completely harmless, and we are only taught to fear them by chemical corporations, and the myth of their dangers.
But spiders help control numerous pests. They even eat the flies and mosquitoes that plague your house. They are beneficial in most gardens, and they can be astonishingly beautiful if you know what to look for.
A spider has senses far beyond ours for feeling, chemistry, vibration, tasting, and more.
Spiders also spin silk, trap, and hunt, displaying incredible abilities that we can learn from and imitate. They are also so diverse and yet, invisible, which is a sort of superpower in its own right.
Like all animals, and even those we consider pests, spiders are magnificent housemates that deserve much more appreciation and respect.
Pests are made in the mind
Most “pests” are those animals we subjectively single out for their inconvenience to us. We also inadvertently hurt other species when we try to control another, such as when we weakened bird eggs with pesticides like DDT. We also use any toxins to kill when elimination of what attracts pests is the only long-term solution.
Adding poison to the food web, water, air, and soil brings on its own problems of course. When in doubt, do without. Find a longer-term and effective treatment.
That is, as long as human beings leave garbage about, we will attract insects, rats, mice, raccoons, and more. They are where we are. They will be where possible food for them will be.
It is not logical to ignore this fact.
Pests, also, are over-abundant and invasive in those places where we bring them, such as rats, mongoose, and pigs, to Hawaii.
E.O. Wilson’s work suggests very strongly that “Paradise found is paradise lost.”
Typically, our past intervention with pests has been to eradicate them with terrible consequences. In 1958 killing all the sparrows left a starving populace which killed millions of people in China. Sparrows eat locusts and other insects that destroy crops, but the people were told it was the sparrows who were stealing all the grain.
In the USA, we largely eradicated wolves, beavers, big cats, and bears. Now we know they are crucial food web species that create balance and prevent famine and repair rivers and other ecosystems.
Human-animal conflicts are increasing as we encroach more and more upon natural habitats. In India, leopards are endangered, largely from poaching and animal trafficking (for parts), but also due to hatred toward the cats who are seen as livestock killers. The same is true for elephants in Asia and Africa,or alpha predators in the Americas.
This week, a polar bear was euthanized in remote Alaska after two persons were killed. As the Arctic melts and food sources diminish, this sort of tragedy will increase.
Of course, we also now have to worry about the next large global pandemic — such as COVID 19 — even as we continue with those diseases we already have of zoonotic (animal) origins regularly spread by mankind.
All creatures large and small are coming into our sights as humans continue to spread and develop throughout the world.
Now that climate urgency is here, habitat destruction is a major moral issue of our times.
Yet, by farming insects, or creating diversity in crops, we could humanely decrease meat consumption and curtail deforestation. We can also come to appreciate the vital work of “pests” in the living world.
Perhaps we will begin to look upon sharing the Earth with both a practical, and passionate, sense of who and what is of value.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash
