Should I Feel Guilty About Killing Ants?
debragalant | April 18, 2011
A few weeks ago, our kitchen was suddenly overrun with ants. The little ones. Marching all over the sink and countertops, making themselves perfectly at home. I discovered, to my surprise, after leaving an almost-empty can of tuna in the sink, that ants are huge fans of tuna fish. It looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
That was when I caused my first ant holocaust, wetting a paper towel and swiping up a few hundred of them, and turning on the faucet to flush the rest down the drain. I felt bad while I was doing it, wondering if to the ants I was their tsunami — a cruel and powerful force of nature.
I didn’t have any moral qualms when my husband brought home baits and set them out. Didn’t think twice about it. I was just relieved when, almost overnight, the ant armies began to disappear. The violence apparently happens offstage, back in the ants’ nest, where the whole colony, including the queen, devours the poison and dies. Kind of like Jonestown.
But it’s those poor strays, crisscrossing the countertops like lonely post-apocalyptic stragglers, that I feel most guilty about. It seems necessary to kill them — like wiping up crumbs — and yet it is hard to ignore that they are creatures. They have heads, they have legs, they walk, they’re heading somewhere. Until I come along with my sponge.
I have been known to release errant insects into the wild. It just seems a bit of a nuisance to release something that small. So I kill, and feel guilty. And cringe a little, in karmic fear, hoping there isn’t a creature bigger than me who will take a giant swipe at my plane when I go to Europe on Wednesday, just because it’s messing up some pristine cloud.
It’s not like I’m a vegetarian. I eat meet and wear leather. But the cows, like the ants killed by the baits, die out of my sight. So I rarely think about it.
I did think about it, though, we all did, several years ago, staying at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the day they took the calves away. The artist colony shares some property with a farm, but up until then, the cows had just been so much scenery. Until we heard the heartbreaking keening of the mother cows. And wondered and asked and learned that the calves had all been taken away.
For us fiction writers, and the painters and composers, the sad lament was just part of the background for the next few days. We all talked about it, at breakfast, at dinner. But the poets — like tuning forks — vibrated with it. They took the pain in, poked at it, struggled, and finally turned it into lovely words.
Poets are very sensitive. My guess is they don’t kill ants. Or at least they don’t kill ants lightly.
Ant photo by Sanchom via Flickr.
If insects, or rodents, come into my home, all bets are off and I kill them. Well, I get my husband to kill them, but those suckers must die.
I have no problem committing insecticide in my home. The ants aren’t serving any good, natural purpose running around your kitchen. It’s not like they’re in the wild and you just decided to stomp on an anthill. When they’re outside, they’re food for other creatures, and have their own place. Inside, though, that’s a whole different thing–and then it’s war.
Diatomaceous Earth, better than spraying them down with Raid and watching them die right in front of you.
We also have those little black ants and I’ve been squishing them every other second. I also am very conscious of taking the lives of these little pests and haven’t been able to do it without guilt. But I agree with Georgette, once they are in my house, it’s war. We opted for some over-the-counter poison instead of calling an exterminator. I also found myself telling my kids to kill them if they saw any. I have to admit, I felt kind of badly about that.
I’m feeling guilty. I just squirted a whole bottle of terro in to an outdoor telco cabinet in which they have decided to build a nest. They are lapping it up. It appears they are practically celebrating. Soon they will all be dead and i feel terrible about it and it makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me.
kmb: sarcasm?
I usually catch and release them, but my house guest just put down Terro, and I am feeling very upset now
I had finished a bowl of cocoa pebbles, and half hour later, i look down at my bowl again and see a swarm of ants feasting. Instinctively.. I grabbed the bowl and started walking to my kitchen to wash down the bowl. But I looked at them all run around in panic, as if they were communicating with each other “we need to escape! we are in trouble!”… for some odd reason I let them live. and then i Googled “should i feel bad about killing ants”
I still can’t get over a bad break up with someone two years ago. It was my first real sense of love with anyone and that says something since I am 42.
I didn’t really think about stuff like guilt over killing ants until this place in life. Now, when things are quiet and I see a single ant heading someplace, even if it seems lost, I let it go and try to wonder about it’s destiny. Maybe it will find it after it leaves my sight.
That seems like a nicer outcome than most.
Love it. Thank you for posting this. I will return to this site to see what’s new and tell my neighbors about your site.
I just sprayed some insecticide in my room after seeing a bunch of ant armies crawling on my leftover cup in whoch i drink my sweet tea from. I saw them crawl back into this small gap on the side of my wall and so i sprayed some there figuring that’s where they built a nest. Soon hundreds of ants crawled out of that gap and died instantly. While some others were slowly weakened by the strong smell of poison. I felt extremely guilty when i saw two or three ants who seemed to be surviving picking up their friends and running as if they were looking for help. It almost made me hate myself. And here i am sitting with my laptop wondering if i should feel like i just murdered a whole village of innocent creatures.