Sunday, September 28, 2008

Please don't kill spiders!!


I just had an email that really made me mad. The writer said "needless to say its dead now but when I sprayed the spider" etc and went on to describe a harmless garden orb weaver.

This was my rather irate reply:
"Why needless to say did you spray it? Why do people go around and kill every spider they see? Do you kill every bee or wasp that you see? That spider was a harmless garden orb weaver and very beneficial in keeping down the number of insects in your garden so there was no need at all to kill it!!"

This photo is of a garden orb weaver like the one she killed. There are heaps of them around homes in large orb shaped webs at present and if you have them at your home, please leave them alone!!

1 comment:

Signe said...

Hi, I know how it is, I get pissed when someone hurts an animal. I think it's offensive when people label spiders as "scary". Why scary? Only a few kinds are actually dangerous and spiders generally don't look ugly, they don't look worse than insects, actually, I think spiders are cuter than insects, cuter than butterflies and lady bugs, even. Garden spiders are quite harmless, a bite would only cause similar symptoms as a wasp sting, so yeah, I don't want them too close to my cats and little cousins, but I would never harm a spider. We had some garden spiders around the house a while ago and they have kind of a bad reputation in Sweden, as they by comparison to other Swedish animals are quite poisonous... See, Sweden barely has any poisonous animals, so people get worked up over the little things... I was thinking we could take the spiders to the forest, so they wouldn't be near the cats, but I googled the spiders and found that they of course are quite harmless... Besides, seemed like they moved away by themselves, so no action was needed!