CREATURES’ COMFORT

There was a spider in the bath this morning. I am no Annie Hall, so I did not summon assistance. It’s curious that people are so “afraid” of spiders. Like all such fears, there is no basis for it in rationality. Poisonous spiders are not apt to turn up in England. Arachnids have no designs on humans; indeed, like all creatures on the planet, they have far more reason to fear man than vice versa. I suppose it is that spiders scuttle that makes them unsettling. You can’t guess where they will get to next and, relative to their size, they make cheetahs look torpid. I used to be bothered by moths which, I guess, had to do with the combination of their fluttering (the airborne equivalent of scuttling) and their unpredictability. But I got over it.

Before I run the bath, I wipe it round with an old sponge topped with a splodge of Cif. Cif used to be called Jif, a much more apposite name. Now I can only think of cleaning the bath as The Revenge of the Cif. After I have splooshed water around, I also slosh some into the jacuzzi jets. I’m not swanking, just describing what sort of bath we inherited when we bought the house. Spiders that have found themselves marooned in the bath sometimes hide in the jets. I only found this out one morning soon after we moved in when I was enjoying a soak and a very large and very dead spider floated past my head.

Today’s spider was also a casualty. Despite The Revenge of the Cif, I was just lowering my foot into the water when a house spider, much the same size as its late predecessor, appeared on the water’s surface. I was dismayed. I fished it out on a sponge and lowered it onto the sloping roof below the bathroom window but there seemed no hope that it was alive. However, when I looked again after the bath there was no sign of the bedraggled creature. Had it recovered and staggered away or had a passing bird snapped it up? I shall never know.

I don’t take a Buddhist view of the sanctity of animal life, nor subscribe to the Blakean notion that “everything that lives is holy”. But I do not think that living creatures should lose that life merely for my convenience. I am not a vegetarian so of course animals, birds and fish do perish on a daily basis for my consumption. I think this is a necessary process and – I have argued elsewhere in this blog – a practical one. All the creatures that we humans would have eaten next week will not be free to relish long and productive lives if, tomorrow, the eating of flesh is declared unlawful.

Spiders, though, perform a function useful to humans. They kill and part-consume flies and other insects that do not benefit us. I have no quarrel with any spider and, if I find one in a situation that endangers it, I will endeavour to catch it alive and convey it to a safer place. We do the same all summer for bees, butterflies, moths and hornets that become trapped in our conservatory and soon succumb to dehydration. If a daddy-longlegs (that is, a harvestman or crane fly) put in an appearance, I would save that too but these benign, spindly oddities are becoming rare. I am not in the slightest aggravated by wasps, knowing full well that to demonstrate aggravation to a wasp is likely in turn to aggravate it. Those people who get stung are usually those who wave their arms about ineffectually when a wasp is present.

The other day, I found a wasp struggling in the kitchen sink. Its wings, having got wet, seemed to prevent it from righting itself. For fully ten minutes, I attempted to prize it onto a kitchen cloth but every time it seemed within a whisker of safety, it wriggled away. In the end, I gave it up and washed it down the plughole. Instantly I regretted it. What right did I have to seal its fate, even though, at this time of year, wasps are anyway doomed and dopey? I know that, in the objective order of things, a wasp is nowhere near as “important” as a human. And yet I cannot say that its life is any less dear to it than mine is to me. Indeed, wild creatures perform a daily drama of staying alive, surrounded as they are by predators or threatened with starvation. They must have a more vivid sense of danger than we humans ever have, unless we live in a war zone.

I have told this tale before but some years ago I came across an earwig in the house. I had a formative experience of these rather alarming-looking little blighters when, playing in a friend’s garden, I stuck the end of a bamboo cane in my mouth and then found myself spitting out a nest of earwigs. Not nice. In the grown-up experience, it was winter and so we had a log fire going. I gathered the intruder onto a sheet of paper and dropped it onto the fire, expecting it to be instantly consumed. Instead, it bounced on a log and secured a foothold, then ran about seeking means of escape. There was none. Nor could I help it. Now I felt bad. As I watched, it clearly became increasingly desperate and then hopelessly pressed itself into a crevice in the wood where no doubt it soon braised to death. I know that, while my memory lasts, I shall not forget that earwig whose drawn-out death I needlessly caused.

Why are we fearful of and cruel to insects? It is true that the creature that has killed more humans than any other is not the snake, crocodile, rhinoceros, lion, tiger or water buffalo but a tiny insect, the mosquito. I have no compunction whatever about squishing mosquitoes whenever I encounter one – and, as we have an ancient pond quite near the house, I do so rather often on summer nights.

Some years ago, in Kerala in southern India, I was just closing my book before bedding down in a circular hotel room when I spotted an unfamiliar insect on the wall six or eight feet from me behind a piece of furniture. It was a rather noticeable insect, highly coloured and on the large side – somewhere between the size of a dinner plate and a small family car. I regarded this beast quite evenly. I thought of my options: 1) run screaming from the room; 2) hit it with a chair; 3) smother it in an item of clothing and bundle it out of the door; 4) switch off the bedside light and go to sleep. It wasn’t very difficult to decide on option 4 and I drifted off in seconds. In the morning, the insect had gone without taking any of my limbs with it. I couldn’t guess how such a huge insect could have escaped the room. Had I swallowed it in the night? I think I would know if I had. Probably it was clinging to the underside of the bed. I didn’t bother to look.

Generally, I pursue a policy of live and let live with any living thing. Under the jetty that juts out over our ancient pond, a rat took up residence last summer, unperturbed by the scent of dogs. Our little dog, before he lost his sight, loved to chase him. But there has been no sign of him this year so he has perhaps moved on. I rather miss him. And I am not in the slightest alarmed by his recent proximity. The conventional wisdom has it that there is a rat within fifty feet of everyone on the planet (much closer in London). We are routinely warned about the danger of diseases carried by rats but did you ever hear of anyone being made ill by the proximity of a rat? I think people who drive too fast are a much greater danger.

But that, finally, is the important point about creatures. None is remotely such a danger to us, to their fellow creatures or to the very survival of life on earth as humanity. It is man who is the creepy-crawly, the bug, the vermin, the pest.