LIVE and LET LIVE

There was a spider in the bath this morning. Not being Annie Hall, I had no need to summon assistance. I couldn’t initially see it but I knew it was there – on the enamel, I could feel cobwebby stuff and there were what looked like some scraps of mostly-consumed fly.

Our bath has three jacuzzi jets and spiders are apt to hide in those. I did what I always do before having a soak: I splooshed some cold water around the bath and into the jets. This usually flushes out the intruder. I have a clear plastic tub ready and I lower it over the spider. Then I slide an old postcard under the creature, being careful not to damage its legs, so that it is trapped in the tub. I lift the tub clear and deposit the spider outside. We do the same all summer for bees, butterflies, moths and hornets that become trapped in our conservatory and otherwise would soon succumb to dehydration. I’ve even been known to rescue wasps and flies in the same manner.

A house spider, your friend

On this occasion, the spider wouldn’t come out. I tried several times without success, then started to fill the bath with cold water. I figured the rising tide would drive out the spider, but by the time the water level had topped the jets nothing had emerged. I drained the bath again. Raising one of the jets with my finger, I found the spider in a bedraggled heap underneath. I guessed it had got trapped and had drowned. I was crestfallen. Spiders are completely admirable creatures. They 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. If a daddy-longlegs (that is, a harvestman or crane fly) puts in an appearance, I try to save that too but those spindly oddities are becoming rare.

I fished out the corpse on a loofah and dropped it onto the sloping roof below the bathroom window. Immediately it jumped up and scuttled away. My heart leapt. How smart of it to lie doggo and hope that I would not try to kill it. And how tough it must be to survive immersion in water.

Daddy-longlegs

The specimen in question was a common house spider. The species’ most active season is beginning and I had noticed that none had been trapped in the bath so far this year. Now I shall be on the lookout for others. I don’t want any to perish for my convenience.

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.

Those who have a thing about spiders and other small creatures crossly counter one’s rational points by retreating to their knowledge that their fear is indeed irrational and therefore cannot be addressed by reason. Fair enough, as long as I am not expected to sanction the gratuitous killing of innocent creatures in order that this irrationality be indulged. The logical extension of their position is that the irrational fear people feel towards those of another race, nationality, creed or sexuality is equally acceptable and should be “understood”. I don’t think so.

My partner’s niece declares gravely that spiders bite. No they don’t, not in Britain anyway. This is an old urban myth, refuted again and again by those who study arachnids and know of what they speak. In any case, our niece adores dogs and no one disputes that they bite and do so rather more significantly than any insect. 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.

Moth

There is an essay by Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, as masterly as it is moving, that catches as I never could the microcosmic resonance of the fall of a tiny creature: “… it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body … It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death” [The Hogarth Press 1942]. That Mrs Woolf’s own fragile grasp upon life was to yield within a year of setting down those words only adds to their poignancy.

From that fine and delicate sensibility, born in Victorian England and nurtured in the hothouse of antebellum Bloomsbury, to the facile celebrity of contemporary telly and Sunday Times column stardom is a sheer precipice. Yet I know without need of a thought that I would rather the rare air than the foothill froth any time. On an edition of Have I Got News For You, the motor-loving broadcaster and wide boy Jeremy Clarkson once boasted that, while lately driving at night, he had deliberately run down a fox.

How can anyone but an insentient thug do a thing like that? And how could he then volunteer it about himself as though it made him a grand fellow? How could he know – would he indeed care? – that it was a clean kill, that the victim of his prank did not suffer a prolonged death agony? And not only did he gratuitously slaughter a beautiful, defenceless animal but, given that she might have been a vixen foraging for her pups, he may also have condemned her litter to slow starvation. A man who can commit such wanton cruelty would be capable of running down a badger. Or a deer. Or a cat. Or a dog. My dog.

I don’t take a Buddhist view of the sanctity of animal life, nor do I subscribe to the Blakean notion that “everything that lives is holy”. But I do think that living creatures should not 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 on this blog – a practical one. 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. In such a circumstance, there would simply be a clearing-the-decks cull on an unimaginable scale.

Earwig

I have told this tale before but it pertains. 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 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, surrounded as it was by flames. 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.

I accept that, in the objective order of things, an earwig 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, menaced 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.

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, bear, 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 used to have an ancient pond quite near the house, I did so rather often on summer nights. I argue that skeeters are a special case – them and ticks.

Some years ago, in Kerala in southern India, I was just closing my book before bedding down in a 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. Perhaps 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 site, rats sometimes take up residence, unperturbed by the scent of dogs. Our little dog, before he lost his sight, loved to chase them. But there has been no sign of any rats for a year or two so they have perhaps moved on. I rather miss them. And I was never in the slightest alarmed by their 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 sometimes 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.

And 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, the spider in the bath.

Note: this is a refreshment of a piece (or, as my chum Simon prefers, a monograph) posted some three years ago.