your-naked-magic-oh-dear-lord:
There are ants in my kitchen. I do not want them to be there.
I can kill them, of course. I do kill them directly on occasion. I do not have a problem with my mother setting out poison for them, though I wonder how it may affect other organisms that might later feed upon those poisoned ants. I will transport spiders and non-destructive native species outside when I can, but I do not hesitate to kill invasives. An ant crawling on a plate as I am eating from it will be executed without hesitation, and yet that same ant would be rescued if I saw it dancing on the lid of my tea kettle and unable to escape the rising heat. I may kill it or allow it to be killed later, but I do not want it to suffer under my watch.
Why does an insect’s death seem wrong to be at some times but not others? Is it merely the amount of attention I give to it? Is sympathy, or empathy, or altruism, or whatever it is, a matter of convenience or depth of thought? It’s easy to “switch” targets – when I feed a cricket to a frog or sacrifice a beetle to a Venus flytrap, I am killing one innocent and nurturing another simultaneously.
Where do you draw the line between cruelty and kindness? What “depth of field” do you choose as the appropriate amount of care to have for other living things, or how do you reconcile your own inconsistency? Is there a pattern to it? At what level of complexity do we draw the line between “organisms that it is absurd to be merciful towards” versus “organisms it is unthinkable to be cruel towards”?
I just rescued an ant from my tea kettle and wondered about hypocrisy.
Are you ok ship
Is there something about wondering about these questions that suggests I’m not okay?
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