The Need for Bugs

In my family and among my friends I’m known as the girly person. I don’t do dirt, don’t break finger nails, don’t take out the trash, and I have never, ever had to cut the grass or change a flat tire. It’s not that these things are difficult or impossible to learn; I just don’t have to do them. Other people do them for me. (I may be slightly spoiled but not much).

Surprisingly, I got a laugh from Becca’s blog about bugs (http://backyardtransliteration.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-bugs.html), especially the part about her shrieking as she’s carrying the stink bug outside instead of killing it. It reminded me of my college roommate. She was such a tom-boy. When we would walk down the street, I would get side tracked by a good looking man and she would get side tracked by the truck said man was driving. The one thing that she could not tolerate was bugs.

I found this hilarious. If she would find a bug in our house, she would first shriek, find a shoe, and start throwing the shoe at the bug to kill it. No bug was safe in my house when she was around. Even more surprising was that I was the one who became the official bug exterminator in the house even though I was the girly one.

To annoy my friend I would always refuse to kill the bug. Instead, I would catch and set if free outside. This annoyed my roommate because she said that doing that just gave the bug the opportunity to find its way back inside our house.

I set the bugs free simply to annoy my roommate, but after reading Becca’s blog I realize that my torture tactic was actually good for nature and its creatures. I am under the belief that everything was put on this earth for a reason – bugs included. There is such a thing called a food chain (which bugs are a part of whether we like it or not) that helps all life forms thrive to make nature and our earth the way it was intended. Humans should try to not mess with this system as much as possible. Will that stop me from killing a spider the next time I find one in the house? I guess I’ll have to wait to find out.