M
Marshchild
Guest
I think you’ve definitely raised some valid points there. Interestingly, my username comes from that of an alien creature (basically, a baby swamp monster) that appeared in a Doctor Who story (one of the old Tom Baker ones), and which almost ended up becoming a victim of vivisection itself. Due to its innocent childish curiosity taking it someplace it really should not have gone - on board a spaceship - it ended up being captured by humans, who, callous to its obvious terror of them (and despite the Doctor’s efforts to get them to leave it alone), handed it over to their chief scientist for examination. He decided that the best thing to do with it would be cut its head open and dissect its brain while it was fully conscious, all in the name of science! At the last minute, however, it managed to break free of its restraints, throttle the aforementioned creep of a scientist (whose methods would have surely made Joseph Mengele proud), and then trash his laboratory, its rampage only ending when it foolishly drove its fist through a video screen and electrocuted itself. Truly, its suffering was the most heartrending thing I’d ever seen on that show, and, even now, it still bothers me to think about it.
What made it even worse was the fact that, after the creature had died, the scientist’s superiors, who’d given him the authorization to conduct his perverse “experiment” (despite the fact that at least one of them had a child himself!), dismissed the creature’s behaviour as merely more evidence of what a bunch of “mindless brutes” its kind were (as if any of them would have acted with any more restraint under the same circumstances! 
).Anyway, moving onto the original topic of this thread, I have to admit that since studying invertebrate zoology as part of a (sadly failed) attempt to get a Science Degree at university many years ago now, I’ve developed a lot more respect for insects and other “creepy-crawlies”, and there are very few kinds of these creatures that I’ll kill nowadays. Flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches are probably the only insects I’ll still kill on sight, mainly because they spread disease*, and (in the case of the first two) can be really, really irritating. Even there, though, I’ll still endeavour to despatch them as humanely as possible: usually by spraying them and then squashing them. With other insects and similar creatures I find inside, I’ll trap and release them, or, if they’re not too numerous, just let them be (really, most of them don’t bother me at all). One type of insect for which I’ll make a partial exception is ants, which I’ll leave alone (to the point of going out of my way to step over trails of them), unless I see them swarming all over some other poor insect that’s still alive; in that case, I’ll “euthanize” their prey by stepping on it (I’ve put a lot of bees out of their misery by doing that), invariably killing quite a few of the ants in the process as well (serves them right!). I’ll also kill redback spiders (basically, the Australian version of the black widow), if they’re getting too numerous: again by employing the “spray and stomp” method. The last time I did this, though, I felt really lousy because insect sprays really do do horrible things to the things you use them on. (They kill in much the same way that nerve gases do: by destroying an enzyme which degrades the neurotransmitter that causes nerve cells to fire, thereby causing said nerve cells (or, more accurately, the synapses between them) to become permanently “switched on”. That’s why, for example, flies buzz around like crazy when you spray them.)
*For this reason, I’d have no qualms about killing things like fleas either. Hey, I’m not going to show any mercy to something that caused the Black Death!
