Violence

“All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life.”

Spiders scare the bejesus out of me make me uncomfortable.  I don’t know if it’s all of the eyes, or the legs, or knowing that some of them can bite and are venomous. Maybe it’s the way they can suddenly drop from the ceiling and stop right in front of your nose. Perhaps it’s their manner of procuring sustenance, namely by trapping and immobilizing, and then digesting their prey from the inside without actually killing them immediately.

I have killed many spiders over the course of my life. Not out of hate. Out of fear. I can think of one in particular, the size of a baseball, on which I unloaded an entire can of Raid and then, for good measure, hit with a shovel. Repeatedly. For about 10 minutes before I was able to believe that it was actually dead.

I have never felt comfortable killing spiders, because on some level, I am aware that I am taking a life.  Yet I am afraid and I don’t want to have to abandon my home, knowing that somewhere a spider lurks. The end result is that if I see a spider and it is in my house, I have felt that I didn’t have any other choice.

The act of killing a spider (aside from that baseball sized one that was outside our old condo under a balcony) involves finding a large flat object, like a magazine, sneaking up on it, and bashing it to smithereens. During the entire process, my autonomic system is going into overdrive. I feel like it’s hunt or be hunted. It’s very unpleasant.

A few months ago, I heard the story of a famous animal trainer, who as a guest in someone’s house, came across a spider in the bathroom. The guest instructed everyone in the household to leave the spider alone, as he was going to train it. Over the course of a few days, the trainer was able to get the spider to go to a “target” on command. The trainer used nothing more than the technology of positive reinforcement. He figured out something to reward the spider with (never found out what) and a way to let the spider know a reward was coming (a clicker), and when the spider headed towards the target, he clicked and then rewarded until the spider could do it on command.

Hearing this story did not completely eliminate my fear of spiders. It did force me to see see the spider as a sentient being with a right to not to suffer a horrible death, just because it made me uncomfortable. It made me wonder what I would do the next time I saw one.

Just the other day, I had my first opportunity to see what I would do. I found not one but two spiders in our home. I decided I really didn’t have the stomach to kill them and yet I really couldn’t stand to have them in the house. Thinking about other ways to remove them, I settled upon grabbing a jar and knocking them off the wall and into the jar, which worked just fine. I captured them and released them into our yard, without incident.

Something amazing happened in the process. I was calm the whole time. I didn’t feel shaken afterwards. What I realized was that my stress symptoms were actually related to my discomfort with killing than with my fear of spiders.

The next time you see an insect you would kill (although I might draw the line at mosquitoes and deer flies), try to capture and then release it and see if it feels anything different to you.