Do you rescue insects or feed spiders?

i squish them if they’re in my house. I leave them alone in their house.

I have been known to catch innocuous insects (bees, moths, etc.) in a glass and release them outside.

If you don’t mind my saying so, buster, there is something of a contradiction in freeing some bugs and throwing others to the wolves, ahem, spiders. Why do the spiders deserve to live more than the food?

I find spiders very interesting. I guess part of it is a morbid fascination with the whole process of spinning a web, waiting, pouncing, poisoning, and wrapping up the treat for later. I like watching them work. Your right about it being a contradiction unless it was the cricket under the bed I fed the spider.

Bugs outside of my abode = fine and dandy
Bugs in my abode = Leslie smash.

I do not discriminate against any bug. I am an equal opportunity bug smusher.

I usually rescue them.
Unless they are of the blood-sucking variety.

In which case…Die, Bloodsucker! Die!

I’m a rescuer. I never smoosh OK, almost never. The one exception was a black widow that had come into the house on a bunch of bananas. Rescue seemed ill-advised.

I catch all I cn in a paper cup and index card and release…except for Milo’s evening snack. Then I revert to the food chain, briefly. (Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.)

I do destroy the horrible grubs and worms that hatch during the summer in jars of grains and nuts and the gauzy pouches of tent caterpillars that hang from the trees.

please send addresses…i need to know where to forward my bugs…

Bugs that eat other bugs are left alone…unless they are in my bed and then they die.

Don’t all bugs eat other bugs? Maybe not .Does anything eat bedbugs, ticks and fleas? I had forgotten also that I am merciless with the ticks.

If they don’t sting, I feed them to my Oscar fish. Otherwise, if they’re indoors, they either get thrown outside or squashed.

Just reading these makes me want to puke.

@Row: a city girl, are you? :-)

Like many…if inside squish and flush…if outside try to avoid so I don’t squish

Since they out number us by about 1000000000 to 1, I smash every single one of them.

I’ve raised all sorts of buggy things, but it’s the spider thing that creeps me out.

They bite. They are hairy. They are not my husband (who also bites and is hairy).

No, spider popping not for me.

Whenever people freak over spiders or bugs they look like monkeys hooting to me. If they are scared of a little tiny harmless creature they must not have much confidence in themselves, or not understand the real risks. Why would anyone want smashed bug juices all over their house anyway?

I love this question so much. I have this dilemma every time I see a creepy crawling thing. It depends on my mood, but more and more I am letting spiders live. They do help control the fly population. However, I can’t bring myself to let a roach live.

I let things alone. I usually put them outside, but I don’t mind sharing my living space with my fellow creatures if I see some reason as to why they would be better off in the house.

This summer I had a spider in my room, right above the window. Some time near the end of June I saw a fly caught in the web. I watched it struggling for a while, in a purely observational way, then left the room, forgetting about it. A few hours later I reentered the room and saw the same fly still struggling, and really struggling. The poor little guy was thrashing all over the place, making a pitiful buzzing with his wings, which were caught in the web. I felt sorry for him. His will to live was so strong that he had been struggling there for hours, and if I wanted to I could save his life.

But I would be denying the spider the dinner it had worked hard for and was now expecting. The spider had put energy into building the web, and had waited for however long it had waited for a fly to be caught, and for all I knew, the spider could have been waiting for weeks for this fly.

My sympathy for the underdog won out. I figured that if I couldn’t untangle the fly I would place him back where I found him. I took him out of the web, and managed to remove all of the sticky web from his wings. When I was finished I released him outside. He flew away and I felt satisfied.

(I was messing with evolution here. This fly would not have lived in a purely “Survival of the Fittest” world. It was unnatural for him to have escaped. He probably went on to breed more flies who will fly into spider webs. But there’s nothing unorthodox about helping another human being. Neither is there anything wrong with helping a member of a different species.)

After a while I began to feel sorry for the spider as well. While removing the fly from the web I had damaged the web. The spider had missed out on a meal because of me. It began eating away at me until I decided to make up for it. I caught a fly that was buzzing around my lamp, killed it quickly, so it wouldn’t suffer for hours the way the first fly would have had I not saved him, and placed it in the web. I felt terrible that night. I have since made it my rule not to interfere with nature.

As the summer went on I continued keeping my eye on the spider. I grew rather fond of her. I watched her while she mended her web, and if I happened to find a dead fly on a window sill I would place it in the web.

My mother didn’t approve of the spider. She wanted me to get rid of it. She told me it would be fine outside; I retorted that it would be fine exactly where it was. My window was prime spider real estate. My window is always open slightly during the summer to allow for ventilation, and so there were always bugs flying in and out, some inevitably getting caught in the web. And being inside, the web was never destroyed by rain. I wouldn’t have minded so much, except that there was a ball of eggs in the upper corner of the web, which would die if I removed the mother spider. I put up a good fight for her, and my mother conceded. The spider wasn’t bothering anyone one bit, and in fact, I was enjoying watching her.

Then I went away for about a week, and when I came home the web was gone and the room smelled of Raid. So be it.

“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
Charles Darwin

I almost always “rescue” ladybugs. I have no idea why, though! Most everything else is a goner if I find it in my house.

The insect are so huge amount that if you kill some one or you use them to feed another animal there all way is a balance.

I (try to) kill the bugs I see in my house. I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to insects, though. I freak out for a bit and hesitate, but in the end I kill them because I’d rather know they are dead instead of roaming around my house where I can’t see them.. or worse, crawling in my bed. Eewwwwwww..

Both my daughter and I have bug vacuums.

sits back to await the wrath of bug lovers

And what do you do with said vacuumed bugs? Put them outside I hope.

Here’s a question, does anyone here smash stinkbugs? Karma is a bitch sometimes…

The bug vac comes with little baggies that you just toss out…hence never touching dead bug.
The vac’s suction, um, kinda rips ‘em apart a bit…
But you come in my house, you take your chances!

It’s weird how bugs are gross to you, and killing them is gross to me.

Um, today there was a big spider scuttling across the papers on a teacher’s desk, and she was spraying it with something…which had no effect whatsoever. I took off my shoe and clobbered it. It SQUIRTED onto the computer screen and it was nasty, and I felt so sick and nauseated that I had to go find a Coke to ease my queaze. Blech. So I guess poppin’ is for me after all!

I save all insects except roaches yuck yuck….

Daddy longlegs are free to live with me. When I clean, I shoo them away before cleaning their webs. They will just make a new one. I’m not bringing them any food though. I’m sure they can take care of themselves.

Black widows and roaches get whichever household cleaner seems nastiest, since I can’t bring myself to smash them. When they are done squirming, I scoop them up with a paper or something and throw them in the trash.

Crickets are cool. I don’t like the idea of them coming too close though. One time I slept on the couch in the living room because there was a cricket in my bedroom.

Fleas go into the sink and down the drain. I used to crack them in half with a fingernail when I was a kid, but I don’t have the stomach for it anymore.

Ants get smashed. I used to let the odd one live until I found out they were bringing herds of aphids onto the burdock. Jerks.