One of the (few) things I miss about getting up for work before dawn during the winter, is that I miss the lovely frost creations with which Mother Nature decorates our windows. I did, however, get up early enough recently to catch some of them before the melted.
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| I call this one dueling snowmen, |
I confess to having similar qualms come spring & summer when ants & moths invade our space.
MENAGERIE
By
Tim Kreider
November
15, 2014 2:35 pm
When
my kitchen became infested with ants this summer, as it does every
year, I put out ant traps, which, in another annual rite, did exactly
nothing. So I did what I always end up doing — inefficiently
smushing the ants one by one. Sometimes I’ll massacre dozens at a
time in a fit of pique after catching them glutting themselves in my
sugar bowl, but then, seeing a single ant moping around on the
counter looking sort of forlorn and hangdog, I’ll hesitate. He
looks like maybe he’s not having such a great day already. Getting
smushed is the last thing this guy needs.
Dispensing
death and clemency capriciously — killing on petulant impulse,
granting pardons at whim — gives me an Olympian view of how men
must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the
wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is
miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys
are we to the gods.
Ants,
as individuals, do not seem like very complicated animals to me (I’m
sure E. O. Wilson would correct me), but every time I smush one I am
aware I am
extinguishing
for all eternity one being’s single chance to be alive. It’s hard
to believe Descartes convinced even himself that animals were
automata; watching an ant scramble frantically to escape my
annihilating thumb, he certainly looks every bit as conscious of his
own mortality as I am.
Living
in a cabin in the country in the summer, I end up having to kill a
lot of things. In this, as in so much else, my 16-year-old self would
be disappointed in me.At that age I thought maybe Jainism was the
religion for me. All I really knew aboutJains was that they carried
little brooms with them everywhere to sweep insects out
of their paths, lest they accidentally step on a single bug. As a kid
who used to spend most of his time at pools rescuing flailing beetles
from drowning, this appealed to me.
I
note that Jainism originated in India, a country to which stinkbugs
are not indigenous. The stinkbug, an invasive species, has taken over
the Mid-Atlantic region, including my house, in the last few years as
swiftly as the Martians conquered England. It was from stinkbugs that
I learned that any animal in sufficient numbers, no matter how
harmless, can be horrific. An effective stinkbug trap can be
constructed out of a two-liter soda bottle and an L.E.D., but I find
it more thorough and meditative to eradicate them through piecework,
using the nozzle attachment of my vacuum cleaner. They make a very
satisfying thhhhhP! Sound when you suck them up. They then get
to live out the rest of their lives in the oubliette of the vacuum
bag. So my compassion is not quite Buddha-like in its embrace.
Mice
are a stickier moral problem. Mice are mammals, and, it has to be
admitted when you look at them in the light of day, cute — little
bright-eyed wriggly creatures. You can see why they make such
endearing cartoon characters. In an ideal world I would be content to
coexist with mice. But my Gandhi-esque live-and-let-live attitude
hardens into a more Fleming-McCartneyesque one when I go to enjoy my
first cup of coffee of the day and find a tiny, hardened black turd
in my mug. It is then that I set about carefully daubing the trigger
of a mousetrap with peanut butter. So begins a wearisome cycle of
vengeance and remorse.
A
traditional mousetrap is designed to function like a guillotine,
killing instantly and painlessly, but human technology is imperfect.
Having to dispose of the limp corpse of a mouse first thing in the
morning is a depressing chore with which to begin the day, but God
forbid you should find the mouse alive, bleeding, maimed and crying
on your kitchen counter. Now what? Mercy-smush the mouse with a rock?
Put it outside and hope it’ll recover? It will die of sepsis under
your porch. Whatever you do, you are going to feel like John Wayne
Gacy for days. These days I use clever balance-activated traps that
harmlessly capture the mouse. Whenever I catch one I carry the trap
out to the car, place it on the passenger seat, and drive the mouse
up the road to let it out near the house of my neighbor Gene, who
likes animals.
I
feel guilty about this killing to varying degrees, ranging from not
one bit (mosquitoes, horseflies) to sorta (ants, stinkbugs) to
gut-clenching remorse (the mice, the mice). The cartoonist Ruben
Bolling once drew a handy chart explaining the ethical hierarchy of
living things, from close relatives to plants, rating each in
categories from Should You Help It? to Can You Eat It?. Some of these
biases are based on help versus harm — cats and dogs are our pals
and protectors, snakes and mosquitoes can kill us — but some are
irrational prejudice. It is my official policy never to kill spiders,
even though occasionally a large hairy one drops out of the rafters
right onto the back of my hand and I must walk swiftly to the door
holding my hand as far away from me as it will get mentally reciting
Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the mind-killer. My rationale
is: Spiders eat insects, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s
a little like arming the mujahedeen, but as far as I’m concerned
mosquitoes and stinkbugs are the Soviet Union, and there’s a war
on. Also, anyone who’s read “Huck Finn” knows that killing
spiders is bad luck.
It’s
impossible even to live and move through this world without killing
something. Not long ago I stepped out in my lawn and felt something
squish under my heel. Inside my slipper I found the body of a daddy
longlegs, an animal of which I am rather fond, its attached legs
still twitching. Just driving the 10 minutes to the library
and back, I wince as I smush butterflies when I fail to brake in time
to whip them into the slipstream, or, worse, the occasional lightning
bug, whose splattered magical guts leave a fluorescing greenish-gold
smear of stars across my windshield that I then have to watch go
heartbreakingly dark. Once I struck an indigo bunting who’d been
sitting in the road — I didn’t see him in time and he couldn’t
fly out of the way of my grille. I stopped and got out and stood
watching him dying in the grass, slowly spreading his wings,
iridescent under the sun. I helplessly kill dozens, if not hundreds,
of animals daily with my big, dumb, blundering existence.
It’s
fastidious and silly in this culture, kind of sissyish, to confess to
feeling bad about smushing bugs. As far as most of us are concerned,
bugs are household dirt that moves. I recently read an article about
the survivors of an earthquake in the Tibetan city of Yushu that
killed 3,000 people saving thousands of near-microscopic crustaceans
from the mud, as an act of devotion. This may seem to Westerners like
a trivial ritual, a waste of time, but it is, at least, more real
than posting condolences on Facebook or applying a custom R.I.P.
decal to your car’s rear window. A bug may be a small, unimportant
thing, but maybe killing or saving one isn’t. Every time I smush a
bug I can feel myself smushing something else, too — an impulse
toward mercy, a little throb of remorse. Maybe it would feel better
to decide that killing even a bug matters. Does devaluing tiny
insignificant lives have some effect whereby we become more callous
about larger, more important ones, like a karmic brokenwindow theory?
People running for cover on the ground must look antlike from a
bomber or a drone. As flies to wanton boys.
This
summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill
en masse without qualm) down to the Dumpster at the end of my dirt
road. I went to lift up the heavy lid of the Dumpster, and what did I
find in there but two miserablelooking raccoons huddled together in
the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn’t have
been in there for too long, or they would’ve roasted to death in
the summer heat wave. At least they weren’t going hungry — the
floor of the Dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed
watermelon rinds and other amuse-bouches of filth. Still, they
must’ve had a bad night of it in there; they looked scrawny and
matted and sad.
What
I had here was a Situation. I put down my bag of garbage and turned
off the car. I trotted off to a shed where I found just what was
needed — a piece of lumber about six feet long. Raccoons may not
grasp the concept of favors or gratitude but they instantly grasped
the concept of the ramp — I hadn’t even lowered it to the
Dumpster’s floor before one of them reached up and grabbed it with
his paws. (They’re extremely clever, dexterous animals — I do not
doubt they will be the next species to set paw on the moon if we
successfully exterminate ourselves.) I set the board down and backed
off fast. They both clambered up it, crawled across the Dumpster’s
rim, plopped to the ground and slunk off into the woods whence they’d
come — to rehydrate, debrief or generally recollect their dignity.
See? I thought. I am
a
good person. I am helping.
When
I told this story to my neighbor Gene, who puts bowls of meat out for
the local vultures, he told me he lets those same raccoons out of the
Dumpster once a week or so. So O.K., maybe they’re not all that
smart after all. And maybe I am not a hero in the raccoon community.
But whenever I think of all the harm I’ve done in this world,
through cruelty or carelessness, or just by the unavoidable crime of
being in it, I try to remember how I felt standing there, watching
them go.
Tim
Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of
essays and
cartoons.
A
version of this article appears in print on 11/16/2014, on page SR10
of the National
edition
with the headline: On Smushing Bugs.
©
2015 The New York Times Company
