Writes Ingrid Newkirk, in "He hid, hoping against hope I’d leave: how a cockroach changed my mind about killing insects" (The Guardian).
Also at the link to the handy guide:
July 24, 2023
"We’ve often disregarded the feelings of those we don’t relate to. Sometimes this has been other humans..."
"... but humans aren’t the only ones who think and feel. There are animals that cherish their offspring, feel lonely if their life partner dies, and jump for joy. If you burn an insect with a cigarette, it feels pain. If insects were automatons, ants wouldn’t be able to build fungus farms or form boats; bees wouldn’t be able to communicate complicated directions to hive mates; and cockroaches wouldn’t have learned not to eat certain baits that kill them.... So, I quit giving a milquetoast answer to the question of where I draw the line. Now I say: 'We know insects think and feel, so if we ever have an option to avoid harming them, let’s go for it.'
If there are insects in your home, Peta has developed a handy guide to non-chemical, non-lethal methods of asking them to please go somewhere else to think things over."
Writes Ingrid Newkirk, in "He hid, hoping against hope I’d leave: how a cockroach changed my mind about killing insects" (The Guardian).
Writes Ingrid Newkirk, in "He hid, hoping against hope I’d leave: how a cockroach changed my mind about killing insects" (The Guardian).
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84 comments:
Granting rights to nonhumans is a slippery slope. Plus, an awful lot of bacteria vote Democrat.
Out: "Eat Ze Bugz"
In: "Pet Ze Bugz"
We need more parasitoid wasps, dragonflies, and mantids.
The graphic is fine until "No. You only think about yourself." From some level of agreement with the suggestion, based on experience, I turn quickly to wanting to oppose these people.
Why can't they stop themselves? They have this weird compulsion to shame others.
I draw the line at palmetto bugs…er…roaches. Don’t squish em though. If the harmless for people and dogs stuff the exterminator sprays doesn’t get them, sucking them into the vacuum does the job.
PETA has reinvented the Jain religion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
"The Jain cuisine is completely lacto-vegetarian and also excludes root and underground vegetables such as potato, garlic, onion etc., to prevent injuring small insects and microorganisms; and also to prevent the entire plant getting uprooted and killed. It is practised by Jain ascetics and lay Jains."
Religion it was 2,600 years ago and religion it remains today. PETA should admit this.
Seth Brundle said “Insects are very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect.”
Right from the insect’s mouth.
Who you going to believe?
PETA or the only insect to call it like it is.
Now do the COVID virus, because it is a living thing too.
I’ll kill the roach; because left to become an infestation, it will destroy my home whether it knows it or not. It certainly won’t care about the destruction it causes. If it wants to live, stay in the trees and take its chances with the birds.
Also quit smoking.
No. Insects die.
And I won't be eating them afterwards.
Love the smiley spider. Anthropomorphizing animals is PETA's bread and butter. Give it doe eyes and make it look like a baby as much as possible. That way single women on the $10/month contribution plan forget all about the thousands of cats and dogs their organization euthanized at their "no kill" shelter, but now contracts out to other "no kill" shelters after they got caught (by the Guardian no less).
PETA is proof that terrible organizations are still profitable with the right PR campaign and a good graphic designer. NAMBLA should take notes.
Just last night, I was lying in bed when my wife began her toilette in the en suite. As soon as she turned on the light she spotted a cockroach, and sprayed it with the nearest thing available--some air freshener.
A long time ago I would have got up to handle it, but she went to the kitchen and returned with actual bug spray and dispatched his ass after a short hunt.
Roaches, flies, spiders, and mosquitos receive no mercy, but we try to capture and release other small accidental intruders.
So Ingrid Newkirk has found something new to worry about? Worry about the fact your iPhone was built by slaves. Dizzy bitch.
Variety of mosquito traps on our property. The ones that zap (leaving smell of ozone from burning insert flesh) are more satifying than those that just abort the eggs or blow the bugs into a trap where they die from dessication. Mosquitos are our mortal enemy. I suggest to lost men in their 20s that they consider devoting their lives to their potential extinction. Cockroaches are disgusting at like some evolutionary level - I don't think our revulson is just taught. Have you ever seen a 15-month old notice a cockroach for the first time! It's quite different than their first view of a kitten or puppy.
Even birds, which have maybe only 12 offspring a year, just barely manage to survive as a species with a lifetime of maybe 5 years. So of the 60 offspring, two survive to reproduce.
It seems like the others served as meals.
What if the fly eaten by the spider had just gone out on a lovely spring day to find something sweet?
What if the homeless guy who squatted in my house when I was out of town thought he was entitled to be there?
Bugs are more likely thinking of how they would kill and eat you if they could just figure out how. Same as cats.
~Puke~
Why not help a fellow human being. When all are safe, sound &accounted for- move on the cute creatures.
Creepy-crawlies last.
You can’t make this sh”t up.
I liked it when PETA was "People Eating Tasty Animals." I never quite figured out how the loonies got that URL back.
Ingrid Newkirk is a diabetic. She should stop exploiting sheep and let Nature take Her course.
I usually transport wasps, yellowjackets, etc outdoors. Trap in drinking glass when they land, slip card under glass and carry outside.
Dems want to preserve cockroaches because they might be relatives.
A coworker set out a capful of beer for a friendly cockroach that lived in his kitchen. He said the cockroach was his drinking buddy. I have cats so there are no flying or crawling insects in my home.
By the way when I say "some level of agreement," it's about the idea that some critters could see us as roommates and I'm thinking about a specific mouse. And I can still bring myself to guilty weeping thinking about him.
Which is not to suggest that mice are now welcome in our house. We had an unusual one-mouse infestation after entrances had been identified and sealed. Had it been clear there was but a single mouse, we might have acted differently I suppose. Learned to live with cute little pellets in the sofa cushions. Anything would have been preferable to the heartbreaking endgame.
This needs the insect politics tag, doesn't it?
Wait a minute... what about the insects we're supposed to eat instead of meat?
Zero sympathy for cockroaches, but I do not kill spiders or scorpions. Rattlesnakes I simply avoid unless they are next to my house, then I kill them. They are not endangered, and they simply do not coexist well with either people or dogs. I've known a few people who have been bitten and they were all capturing the snakes to re-home them. The hell with that. I re-home them with a shovel.
Insects have brains that do so,e sort of thinking, taking in information and reacting to it. But they don't think like humans. No insect has the concept of "roommate". If we can't kill anything that thinks, I can never unplug this computer.
I guess that means we can’t eat them. Nobody tell Klaus Schwab.
I admit to being a catch-and-release kinda guy. I'll even C&R scorpions that make their way into the house. One time I had one in a pair of tongs and when I tried to flip it over the back wall it held on and dropped onto my arm, which I then shook off, but it fell into the pool so I went and got the pool skimmer and fished it out and eventually it made it to the other side of the wall.
If scorpions could tell stories to their friends, I'd like to hear what that one had to say.
Mosquitoes aren't included. They can go extinct for all I care. In fact, I'd prefer it.
I don't kill jumping spiders (like the one pictured in the meme). They're cute and friendly, like puppies. I will relocate them for my family members who are less fond of spiders than I am.
If you think insects "think" at the level of cognition of "thinking" you are roommates, you're a loon.
Obviously this person has never been bitten by a brown recluse.
'I respect animals and insects by pretending they think exactly like me' is a bad take.
The spider that watches you, to the extent it can even see you, is likely thinking about how it can liquify and consume you.
That said, I generally don't kill insects. My family calls my approach the Spider Relocation Program.
When am I going to see your half of the mortgage payment, roomie?
My rules on insects:
1. Mosquitos die where ever they are found.
2. Lawn-destructive insects (eg Cinch Bugs) die.
3. Other than that, insects outdoors are left alone.
4. Additionally, we plant flowers that feed bees and butterflies, including their caterpillars.
5. Spiders live. If found inside, they are captured and released.
6. Any insects inside the house, other than spiders, die.
If you burn an insect with a cigarette, it feels pain.
No, it doesn't not feel pain. Not, at least, in anyway that we would understand the term. For one, an insects nervous system and "brain" are set up in ways very different from our own. Insects, and all other life that is not human, are more than deserving of our respect, and we should not delight in being cruel for cruelty's sake, but we make a serious error when we conflate what events mean to us and what they mean to an ant, or a chicken, or an orangutan.
If my cat was a human, she would be a psychopathic sadist. No question. Her behavior toward other, smaller, animals displays the kind of casual disregard and deliberate, calculated cruelty which is thinkable only to the Ted Bundy's of the human race. But she is not a Ted Bundy. She is a cat. And a good one, too.
Let animals be animals. Don't burden them with the existential dread which comes with humanity. That, it seems to me, is the cruelest thing PETA does.
So tell me, Greens, what are we gonna eat now?
In my experience, spiders are not naive.
Sure, the insect feels...something. No one knows what it thinks, or how. No one know how it perceives the world. I love spiders and centipedes and won't touch them, but that's primarily due to their usefulness at killing other insects. Any insect that kills other insects is a friend of mine...that is until they get into my cereal.
Is all life of the sacred? No of course not. Tons of life out there just wants to eat me or my things, instinctively and mindlessly. If I kill a roach it's because it's dirty, spreads filth all over the place and ruins my food. I had a wasp's nest hanging ten feet off my deck all summer and didn't do anything because they didn't bother me.
I suppose if super-advanced aliens come here they might treat us like bugs living in our blinking ant mounds. It will be up to us to communicate with them and convince them that we are sapient and worthy of at least vassalage if not peerage, and not extermination.
I guess what I'm saying is if that roach wants to live it better start arranging bread crumbs in Morse Code overnight or something.
Sometimes we are even forced to think about other 'persons' and find them of less worth than a spider. Ever think about that?
Yancey Ward said...
This needs the insect politics tag, doesn't it?
Beat me to it.
...they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise..
I have become very pro-spider in recent years. The Joro spider outside our house last summer was beautiful. Sure they're invasive, but they kill stink bugs, mosquitoes, flies, all sorts of other bugs I don't much want around. So I was cheering her continued existence while she lasted.
I've extended this goodwill to daddy long-legs in our house, in result of which we now have lots and lots of daddy long-legs in our house and my wife is thinking we need to be a bit less live-and-let-live before we're overrun.
(For the safety of my kids, I would preemptively kill any black widow or brown recluse I see, and feel minimal guilt regardless of what PETA says.)
She's a modern day Copernicus
Better than the rest of us
Next I'll think she'll try
To shame the spider for that fly
Flies and ants die, but I try to catch and release spiders, moths, beetles, ladybugs, and the slower winged insects. It isn't from an excess of compassion for our insect friends, but rather an exercise in personal restraint. I don't need to automatically kill anything smaller than me.
Of course, I don't live in a very buggy part of the country. If roaches were a thing here, there'd be none of this Martha's Vineyard Sanctuary shit.
I reject the new hierarchy in favor of the one that has been in development for, oh, about 500 million years.
"Beat me to it.
...they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise.."
No problem- someone else also beat me to it.
farmgirl said...
"~Puke~
Why not help a fellow human being. When all are safe, sound &accounted for- move on the cute creatures.
Creepy-crawlies last.
You can’t make this sh”t up."
It's a testament to the leisure and ease that western civilization provides us that we should concern ourselves with the well being of bugs. In a socialist system we'd be eating them.
I try very hard, when killing an insect, to make it fast and thorough - immediate squash, no wimpy half measures. I'm explicitly trying not to be cruel, but also I hate the crunch. Toward that end, when I kill a big bug like a "palmetto bug" (the big cockroaches referenced above, that everyone thinks of when they think "cockroach"), I do it with a flexible but hefty thing like my husband's flip-flop rather than, for instance, a fly swatter, which might not kill them quickly, or by stepping on them, which grosses me out.
I am in full agreement with biotrekker's Rules for Insects above. I think it included fostering the presence of insects that kill mosquitoes, such as dragonflies, didn't it? I let cockroaches of all kinds live outside because I know they're not doing me harm and are helping to keep the world cleaned up, but I can't abide them in the house. I'll swat at flies outside because they're bothersome and to keep them away from food, but I can't think when I last actually got one.
And yes, anthropomorphizing insects is dumb.
'We know insects think and feel, so if we ever have an option to avoid harming them,
so much, for being able to Eat Bugs!
What's left for dinner? I mean, besides fetuses?
Well now, how many people have fleas killed?
I tend to let God sort 'em out.
Seriously..
IF you think you shouldn't kill (or even bother) bugs, because they are living things..
HOW do YOU justify infanticide? (or abortion, or what ever you call it?)
I guess the answer is (what the answer has ALWAYS Been)..
It's MORALLY WRONG, for other people to do things You dislike..
It's MORALLY CORRECT, for YOU to do WHAT EVER you want to do.
God, the PETA people are stupid, as they have demonstrated many times. My favorite example was turning several thousand farm Mink loose in the New Forest where they (the mink) devastated the wildlife.
Still, I wonder whether this is really an issue of intelligence. If their average IQ was raised 30 points, would it make a difference, or is their behavior a function of some strange manifestation of some inbred need by a percentage of the population to rebel in unique ways in order to affirm their own identity?
As we become the third world, all those third world things become commonplace, and our moral and intellectual betters point out that we should have wanted them all along.
Though there does seem to be a blue-on-blue ideological debate on whether the proles should have to live among the infestations of bugs as coinhabitants, or as a primary foodsource.
We do not in fact "know" that insects feel pain, and there is evidence that they do not. I learned many years, from someone whose testimony I trust, that if you hold a dragonfly between your fingers and twist its abdomen under it so the tip of the tail is in front of its mouth, the bug will eagerly eat as much of its own tail as it can reach, with no hesitation or any sign of discomfort. I'm not going to test this, because it's kind of disgusting, but that's my human emotion: I'm pretty sure any other dragonflies watching you do this won't care either. Dragonflies are very good at dodging if you try to swat them or catch them in a net, but that does not prove that they feel any pain if you do hit them, since they gladly do far worse to themselves when they can.
“Well now, how many people have fleas killed?”
An inmate here in Atlanta was killed by bedbugs.
gilbar said...
"So much for being able to Eat Bugs! What's left for dinner? I mean, besides fetuses?"
You'll still have your greens, gilbar.
Soylent Greens.
My major was biology, my minor entomology (back when that existed). I've studied and raised insects all my life. No, insects are not intelligent except in the same way a sophisticated computer program would be:
(of a device, machine, or building) able to vary its state or action in response to varying situations, varying requirements, and past experience.
With much less 'past experience' than people give them credit for.
roaches are disease carrying, cause allergies and asthma with their feces and harbor all kinds of bacteria. They are not something to live and let live. They are not sentient beings.
What if you spend your life killing elephants as a big game hunter, and then arrive in heaven to see that God is an elephant?
Let me add:
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
Well now, how many people have fleas killed?
Like Biden, "fleas will just cost you arms and legs. You wonder if the flea showed any regard to the man's feelings, not that the man can feel like he used too.
What they think of us…
If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings
KILL 'EM ALL - BUT BE CAREFUL!
My first all-inclusive Asian Adventure began with a weekend in 1966 Bangkok, awaiting a lift to our "Third Country" destination the following Monday.
My two companions and I were pre-booked into a quite grandish hotel of a certain age. Large spaces, lofty ceilings and acres of polished wood appointed with gleaming brass fixtures. Except for lack of a riverside setting, it shamed the Oriental in faded charm and glories and ghosts of long-ago.
It was also the setting of the first potentially lethal encounter of the afore-noted Asian Adventure.
Before even taking our bags to our rooms, exploration of the hotel's ground floor was in order. About the third door we opened revealed an enormous bar paneled in beautiful tropical hardwoods. There were two patrons (it was about 8 in the morning): a couple of buzzed American NCOs who insisted we join them for a taste.
They were in uniform and packed for an afternoon return to "Indian Country". They explained that an unacceptable surplus of their R&R budget remained and they had every intention of correcting that. We immediately agreed to help.
Five or six hours later, I stumbled into my room. Deluxe in every way but the first thing that registered was a Super-Size spray can of some"Raid"-like product. Hmmmm... Maybe normal as there were french doors open to a large balcony overlooking tropical grounds. An occasional mosquito, perhaps.
Then, I peeled back the cover of my bed and there it was!!! Resting atop my pillow was a cockroach creature so large it would fill the largest bun available at Subway. Pulling the covers back did not cause movement of any kind. More like; "Can't you see I'm trying to get some sleep, here?".
Ah! The "Raid"! Not sure if the bug died from the poison spray or whether it simply drowned. I had emptied the entire can. After geeting rid of the body, I took the bedding apart looking for friends and family members. SAFE!
After vanquishing my fearsome foe, I literally collapsed from exhaustion - The 30-hour-flight, the 6-hour R&R send-off and the epic battle-to-the-death.
Only when I woke-up did I realize the "roach" almost got the last laugh. Being a side/stomach sleeper at the time, I had buried my face in a pillow soaked with about a quart of bug-killer. The three-day "hangover" was probably a best case scenario :-)
"Rattlesnakes I simply avoid"
Tangential: I was thinking about the song, "Try That in a Small Town" and it made me think about rattlesnakes, specifically the one on the Gadsden flag. It was chosen for a reason.
Think about rattlers. They do not go looking for trouble, going through towns looking for human victims. Fact is, they try very hard to avoid humans. The only time they will bite a human is when they feel threatened. But before they do, they warn you by rattling, providing you with an opportunity to retreat. And if you fail to heed that warning, they will kill you.
That's what the Jason Aldean song is. A warning to retreat or be killed.
Last week I dispatched the two tomato hornworms that had started eating my tomato plants without remorse or compunction. In fact, I took pleasure in it. They were taking the food out of my mouth, so to speak. I did it by hand, though, instead of using nasty chemicals so I suppose there’s that.
Don’t start nothin’, tomato hornworms, won’t be nothin’.
PS - Screw you, tomato hornworms.
- Rafe
"I don't need to automatically kill anything smaller than me."
Aw, maaannn.
If insects were automatons, ants wouldn’t be able to build fungus farms or form boats; bees wouldn’t be able to communicate complicated directions to hive mates; and cockroaches wouldn’t have learned not to eat certain baits that kill them....
Does not compute! Does not compute! Danger Will Robinson!
Funny. Some random thoughts:
1. Leland said... "Now do the COVID virus, because it is a living thing too." Viruses aren't living. Can't reproduce on their own, for instance. Learned this from my son this year (7th grade bio) although google says there's some wiggle room. So kill away!
2. Bacteria on the other hand... think of the trillions dead since antibiotics were invented. And the way they've needed to adapt to survive.
3. I'm always super amused by discussions of "a friendly cockroach that lives in my kitchen" or similar because sorry that's 400,000 cockroaches (and they all look alike to us).
4. I kill insects that seek to harm me. Mosquitos, termites, cockroaches, wasps, etc. I nurture insects that eat other insects or are beneficial, like spiders, centipedes, and bumble bees. And I generally ignore the rest. This is nature we're talking about. All our feelings and sentiments are just us trying to pretend we're superior to nature.
The PETA supporters may be stupid, but the PETA organization is decidedly not so. According to their 2022 financial report they took in over $82 million from all of their gullible supporters. As PT Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute.
Palmetto bugs and geckos are the main invaders of my house. Palmettos go down the toilet, geckos go back outside.
She doesn't kill insects unless there is no other option. This isn't unreasonable in view of a Do No Harm philosophy. Buddhism teaches the same. Except I'm not sure how this works in a plant-based diet, since plants are living organisms too.
This all reminds me of the bug scene in Schitt's Creek.
I have yet to see a spiderweb reading, "GOOD ROACH" hanging above the kitchen cabinets, and I'm not expecting one. I'm not having the little fellas in the house.
On the other hand, Joe's Apartment was a darn funny movie, and rather sweet, and made me like on-screen roaches more than I ever thought possible.
Those animals (with the sole exception of dogs) are not thinking about you, the selfish bastards.
Consider the Cicada-Killing Wasp. (We get these on our back patio when the cicadas are around.
They attack the cicada in the air, stinging it with a venom that paralyzes it but keeps it alive. They bring it to the ground, remove the wings and legs and drag it into their burrow, where they keep it alive so that the baby wasps can suck the life our of it for a week or so. Then when the baby wasps are ready to go, they leave the burrow and bury the cicada alive.
This is nature.
I got stung last summer by a bald-faced hornet. Knocked me flat worse than the damn shingles vaccine. I now carry an epi pen in my golf bag and have another in the kitchen cabinet at home.
The bastards are mostly trying to kill us.
PETA had a *mobile* kill van that once grabbed a pet off of a family's porch, killed it within minutes, and then threw it in a dumpster.
"Exterminate all the brutes."
Mice are highly efficient transmitters of Lyme disease, infecting up to 95% of ticks that feed on them. Having experienced Lyme disease last summer the most recent mouse in our abode got the Saint George Floyd treatment. Then I shot him/her, they /them with a pellet pistol. Twice.
I (or maybe it was someone else) once left a piece of paper in a typewriter. I (or maybe it was someone else) later discovered that, during the night, a very literate cockroach had jumped up and down on the typewriter keys (couldn't manage the shift key, though) and left the following thought to mull over:
boss the other day
i heard an
ant conversing
with a flea
small talk i said
disgustedly
and
went away
from there
"Viruses aren't living. Can't reproduce on their own, for instance."
I can't reproduce on my own, Daniel12, and neither can you. Are we not alive?
No one brought up Sir Archy the dead cockroach who used to post here on Althouse?
"Granting rights to nonhumans is a slippery slope. Plus, an awful lot of bacteria vote Democrat."
Polls show that the cockroach vote tends heavily Republican.
Hah. I recently did a post on my blog called Asking an important question where a vegan wonders if a vegan can eat carnivorous plants with a clear conscience. She's dead serious, but it gets funnier and funnier as she wanders farther afield pondering the ethics of it all. By the end she's discussing the ins-and-outs of using carnivorous plants for pest control.
There's one vote for putting "The Metamorphosis" on the non-fiction shelf.
The smug "No Kill Shelter" is a pet peeve. (FWIW a 5% euthanasia rate is "No Kill" in many definitions.)
In a county shelter they are REQUIRED to take in any animal. So they take the vicious dog, the slowly dying animal or when the number of animals dropped off vastly exceeds capacity the numbers must be reduced.
The "No Kill" shelters do not have this mandate. For example a German Shepard Rescue/No Kill shelter does NOT rescue every German Shepard. They only accept healthy, adoptable dogs. In fact they go to the County funded shelters and take the healthy, adoptable dogs then use their No Kill status to brag about their superiority.
Feh.
"Polls show that the cockroach vote tends heavily Republican."
You know who else used to dehumanize his enemies? And why he did it?
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