Philosofly

[davidn]

We came back to our flat to find that fruit flies had moved in in our absence - not a Biblical infestation of them, but just little swarms hovering around the bins and sink area. This happens to a lot of homes in Boston at the end of the warm months, and I think our being away for a whole week added to the problem. So fly spray was among my list of things to get from the supermarket the day after we arrived.

I haven't dealt with the need to get rid of more than one insect at a time before, and I had been expecting to just get a little sort of can of it, like the things that you bring with you to repel them when something possesses you to go camping in the middle of a jungle. But what the supermarket actually had was an entire section full of gigantic canisters festooned with various warning signs, showing the product being left in water to detonate in a little mushroom cloud or to spray a ton of white gas around while everyone else in a five mile radius evacuated the area. It took me a while to find one that didn't promise to obliterate with the force of a nuclear warhead, and even it shows a fly corpse in an upside down warning triangle being shot with a lightning bolt.

As I looked at the back, reading over the substantial list of warnings to wash your hands before, after and during use, to never get the stuff on your skin or come anywhere close to breathing it, it dawned on me that what I was buying was an instrument of genocide. I don't consider myself a colossal hippy or anything, but traumatic as it is, I use the glass and paper method to get rid of spiders and various other nasty things rather than outright killing them (besides, you'd never be able to do that after watching the spider episode of Mio Mao) because I don't think I have the right to just drop a coffee table on small things with loads of legs that have accidentally wandered into my field of vision while looking for other smaller things with slightly fewer legs.

It is absolutely necessary to get rid of pests for our own survival, and we're not a virus like Agent Smith says for doing so because killing is very much part of nature's great inexplicable chain anyway, but we're the only species who have the ability to be quite so proud of it - if you think about it for too long, the way that the sheer efficiency of mass death is promised by these things is a disturbing notion indeed.

Then I thought "Sod it, they're only flies" and went home and massacred them.

Comments

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

Kiiiiiillll!

I have done the fly massacre thing before. You can surprise yourself, how long you can hold your breath for!

[davidn]

I've had to - it says to spray everything for ages and then to wait 15 minutes with all the doors closed before ventilating well, but I've sort of been more tentative and sat working in the middle of it all. It's definitely reducing their numbers so far, but I've grown to look out for little specks with wings floating across the corners of vision...

[kjorteo]

Personally, I think that episode was more disturbing than the lethality of insecticides.

[davidn]

I wanted to link to the original Italian version (Britain is not responsible for this) as I posted when I first rediscovered the demented plasticine cats - I saw one episode at about six in the morning when I was five and half thought that I'd just dreamed it - but it isn't up any more... when Channel 5 got hold of it they added English commentary to the sort of helium-sugar-gibberish language in an attempt to make sense of it, and I think it lost some of its charm.

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

The chemical sprays are scary. The yellow sticky traps are often less scary because they're just a bit of coloured plastic with a layer of glue, so it doesn't involve gassing yourself a little bit at the same time. It also handily collects all of the dead flies in one place, so they're easier to clear up.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

Look, Nature itself doesn't think very much of making various animals go extinct. I don't see why we ought to be much different.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

...especially in the case of mosquitos and wasps.