"They're only spiders" - Why I hate this phrase
12 years ago
Today, someone triggered one of biggest pet peeves, and you're all going to suffer by reading a rant of mine thanks to his effort.
"They're only spiders", "They're only bugs", "They're only bees", "They're only wasps".
I've heard these, or a variant thereof, hundreds of times when I've objected to someone wantonly killing a bug. This particular time, it came after I described how I feel upset at the sight of someone killing a spider for simply being a spider. And it came along with a lot of other rubbish and condescension about how I should basically just get over it because who cares about fucking spiders.
Would you kill a lizard for the sake of it and tell a herpetologist to get over it because it's "just a lizard"?
Would you kill a bird for the sake of it and tell an ornithologist to get over it because it's "just a bird"?
Would you walk into someone's home and kill their dog, cat or hamster for the fuck of it, and then tell them to get over it because "it's just a cat/dog/hamster"?
Why is it, then, acceptable to tell an entomologist that killing the animals they study, care about, and work to conserve, that "it's just a spider" when they kill one just for the fuck of it? Why is it so acceptable to treat entomologists with condescension and even contempt for their field?
David Attenborough once correctly pointed out, that the world's ecosystems would get along just fine if vertebrates died out, but vertebrates could not survive if invertebrates (of which 85% of the species are arthropods) were to become extinct. These are the animals which our very existence depends on, and yet so many of us treat these animals with dismissiveness at the best of times, and fear, and contempt the rest.
Our attitude as a society towards these animals needs to change. It's only in the last few years that people have started to realise how disastrous the decline of bees is to our ecosystem and agriculture, but the plight of bees, and their importance to our way of life, is hardly unique among the invertebrate world. It wasn't until 2008 that bees hit the headlines, at which point they'd declined by 50% since 1980, leaving the beekeeping industry in tatters (most beekeepers, I'll remind people, are amateurs or cottage industrialists), and the UK government's budget for bee health research is still a paltry £200,000 a year.
When we consider that bees are everyone's favourite insects, how can we have any hope for the myriad other species which are also in decline or endangered? The IUCN estimates insect species are becoming extinct, on an almost daily rate, many of which have yet to have been researched or described in the scientific literature, and which don't even have a taxonomic name. (And this is before we consider how many other types of arthropods, like arachnids, are becoming extinct)
It's time we started recognising the importance these tiny animals have in the world in which we live.
"They're only spiders", "They're only bugs", "They're only bees", "They're only wasps".
I've heard these, or a variant thereof, hundreds of times when I've objected to someone wantonly killing a bug. This particular time, it came after I described how I feel upset at the sight of someone killing a spider for simply being a spider. And it came along with a lot of other rubbish and condescension about how I should basically just get over it because who cares about fucking spiders.
Would you kill a lizard for the sake of it and tell a herpetologist to get over it because it's "just a lizard"?
Would you kill a bird for the sake of it and tell an ornithologist to get over it because it's "just a bird"?
Would you walk into someone's home and kill their dog, cat or hamster for the fuck of it, and then tell them to get over it because "it's just a cat/dog/hamster"?
Why is it, then, acceptable to tell an entomologist that killing the animals they study, care about, and work to conserve, that "it's just a spider" when they kill one just for the fuck of it? Why is it so acceptable to treat entomologists with condescension and even contempt for their field?
David Attenborough once correctly pointed out, that the world's ecosystems would get along just fine if vertebrates died out, but vertebrates could not survive if invertebrates (of which 85% of the species are arthropods) were to become extinct. These are the animals which our very existence depends on, and yet so many of us treat these animals with dismissiveness at the best of times, and fear, and contempt the rest.
Our attitude as a society towards these animals needs to change. It's only in the last few years that people have started to realise how disastrous the decline of bees is to our ecosystem and agriculture, but the plight of bees, and their importance to our way of life, is hardly unique among the invertebrate world. It wasn't until 2008 that bees hit the headlines, at which point they'd declined by 50% since 1980, leaving the beekeeping industry in tatters (most beekeepers, I'll remind people, are amateurs or cottage industrialists), and the UK government's budget for bee health research is still a paltry £200,000 a year.
When we consider that bees are everyone's favourite insects, how can we have any hope for the myriad other species which are also in decline or endangered? The IUCN estimates insect species are becoming extinct, on an almost daily rate, many of which have yet to have been researched or described in the scientific literature, and which don't even have a taxonomic name. (And this is before we consider how many other types of arthropods, like arachnids, are becoming extinct)
It's time we started recognising the importance these tiny animals have in the world in which we live.
Outside of those cases, I don't have a huge issue with spiders. Wolf spiders creep the hell out of me, but I never see them indoors. I love pholcidae in general, and I think salticidae are fucking adorable. I find orb weavers both bizarre and entrancing... we used to have one just outside the back door for our townhouse, so I'd sit down to do my homework and I'd watch it on its web when the sun hit it.
One night I was coming back into the house through the back door and forgot all about it, and I walked through its web and undid it. I felt pretty bad, though three days or so later I saw a new web and the spider, just a little off the door.
My ire was directed more towards people who kill them with frivolity and then say "They're just spiders" or "They're just bugs".
You definitely have my support as I love bugs.