Why so many of us are casual spider-murderers – “The moment we sense the pitter-patter of their tiny feet across the living room floor, or catch a glimpse of movement in the corner of an eye as they abseil down from the ceiling, they’re likely to end up squashed, poisoned, vacuumed up or simply flushed away from our homes. Why do many of us kill spiders so casually, swatting out their lives with our god-like power, almost like it’s a reflex?” (via)
As the ecologist Stephen Kellert wrote in his book Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia In Human Evolution And Development, “…perhaps the most disturbing, these creatures [insects, spiders and other invertebrates] appear to lack a mental life“. He explains that, to us, they don’t seem to experience human emotions – it’s as though their own minds are irrelevant to their existence. (Though of course, this is an illusion.)
All this means that it’s possible to squash a spider without receiving any feedback whatsoever – and unless your target runs away or the gruesome task is incomplete, there aren’t many signals that you’re doing something unpleasant.
However, this is only true when they’re small – and many people struggle to kill larger ones.
“Here we have huntsmans, which are these massive spiders like this big,” says Greg Neely, demonstrating around six inches (15cm). “But here people don’t kill them, they’re our friends. You might try to shoo one out of the house, but you wouldn’t murder it,” says Neely, professor of functional genomics at the University of Sydney, where he studies pain in fruit flies, among other animals.
Lockwood can relate to this. “The same thing can be true of some very large cockroaches – my wife was pretty much normally averse to insects, but she would not, and I know others that do not like to, step on a cockroach because they make that crunch,” he says, explaining that – many years ago – his wife would catch the insects under yoghurt pots for him to despatch when he got home. “It was like a little death row,” he says.
“There’s something about crushing another being that we don’t have a big problem with until we get some sort of sensory signal, which says that this is an actual killing or this is violence,” says Lockwood.
also btw…
- What we do and don’t know about kindness – “In recent years, psychologists have gained a deeper understanding of human kindness and its benefits, but as Claudia Hammond writes, there’s still so much to explore.”
- Huntsman spider nest discovery reveals arachnid’s unusual family ties – “While some boxes had become homes for possums, one box was full of dozens of huntsman spiders, all believed to belong to one family… ‘A single adult female lays eggs and the successive generations of siblings help each other out and share prey items.'”