Stick with me for this, because I know how it sounds. As a heads up as well, I will not be including a few pictures of spiders throughout this article so if you do have a phobia of spiders then no need to brace yourself!
One of the biggest dilemmas I have had as a vegan is how I treat spiders. I have always had a massive fear of spiders because…well they are really creepy. They move weirdly and they just always give me the heebie-jeebies. In my parents house as well and growing up, spiders LOVE me. If there is a spider in the house then I guarantee it would have been in my room. There were also a number of occasions that I woke up to a hug house spider on my pillow next to me. I don’t want to know how long they may have been sat there watching me sleep because that is just too creepy to think about. But just as I would never wish to harm a butterfly or a moth or even woodlouse, why would I be ok to harm a spider? The vegan side of myself knows that these spiders mean me no harm and that they are a vital part of the ecosystem. The arachnophobe side of me though would rather burn my house to the ground than have to sit in a room with a spider.
You see my dilemma here.
Now oddly since moving into my own place, I have developed quite a tolerance for spiders. Provided they don’t move too much. The most common spider guests we have are the daddy long leg, actually known as a Cellar Spider. They are the spiders with the tiny tiny little pin-point of a body with the super long and almost see through legs. Very creepy looking, but from my experience they do not move. We have one spot in our house – in the corner of our hallway – where cellar spiders tend to set up their little webs. I do not know how long they tend to live for but we seem to have one for about a month, he then randomly disappears, and then a few weeks later a new spider seems to appear. Or maybe the original spider just went on holiday?
We do also seem to get the off house spider. Now…I am not a fan of these guys. We have one that we think lives under our fridge. We have only seen him once and I think it scared all of us so much he hasn’t ventured out again. He walked out while we were watching TV and I spotted him out of the corner of my eye. He stopped, seemingly spotting me as well. We stared at each other for a moment. I asked him ‘where do you think you’re going buddy?’ and he looked at me for another moment, and then tried to move forward. Now, the giant house spider is the fastest of the UK spiders so these things move WAY too quickly for my liking. He made a move forward, I screamed, which in turn made my partner scream, and Mr House Spider immediately turned tail and disappeared under the fridge in a flash of brown legs. I haven’t seen him venture out recently, but I am also not going to start rooting around under the fridge to see if he is still there. We seem to have an understanding that he is welcome in this house so long as we never see each other.
We also occasionally get some of the smaller, black spiders – possibly the false black widows but again, I am not getting close enough to them to really try and identify them – but these guys are so tiny that we can normally get them in a glass and put them back outside. The false widows can give quite a nasty bite (not venomous, but their bite is similar to a bee or wasp sting) so we don’t really want to take a risk and have one of them nip us. These guys as soon as they are spotted are trapped in a glass of some sort and are placed outside in some of the plants we have outside. This mainly happens in the bad weather – when it is very cold out, it snows, or there has been a lot of heavy downpour – so we also make a decision on the day. If we spot one on our window for example, or right in the corner or our kitchen, we will leave them be. But if they are on the floor or in the bedroom or too near to Lola, they unfortunately have to be evicted.
As creepy as I may find spiders, I have slowly realised just how helpful they can be in the home. Especially in the boiling hot summer months where we are always infested with flies and midges and mosquitos. Having a few spiders in the home we have found really does keep the flies and other flying bugs down in the summer. This is very important to us because not only do I get eaten alive every summer (apparently my blood is like cocaine to mozies and midges and all other blood sucking bugs out there) but with Lola, the risk of flystrike in rabbits is always a concern for us. Knowing that we can keep the windows open and the flies can be dealt with by our friendly household spiders really does help us feel a bit more relaxed at home. It also means we don’t have to worry about melting to death by keeping all of the windows shut throughout the day.
I have also found that the other household creepies that you can sometimes encounter are way lower when you have a spider around the house. One of the most common pests in the UK is the silverfish. Now these guys are not only super creepy but they can actually get to a pretty decent size which is not ideal at all. We tend to get them a lot in the bathroom or in our kitchen cupboards and these guys genuinely make my skin crawl. They are like something out of a horror movie. There is no greater fear than turning on your bathroom light and seeing a handful of these little demons swarm across the floor to hide under the bath or in the wall again. It’s so scary. But having a spider in our bathroom has really helped eradicate all of these silverfish. We have now lived in our current property for 4 years and we have not seen a silverfish in the last 3, when we first let our cellar spider in the bathroom stick around.
I have also learnt a new appreciation for spiders since letting them into my home. Aside from the slight encounter I had with Mr House Spider, all the spiders in my home keep to themselves. They have never impacted on my day and most of the time I don’t even realise that they are there. Even when I do, they again keep to themselves, barely move, and their little webs are barely noticeable. Even the webs that we do notice, are quite beautiful to look at. Now obviously we don’t let them completely decorate the whole house, but one tiny corner of the house doesn’t really bother me. And as I say, if they keep the other creepy crawlies in the house in line then I guess I can allow them to decorate their surroundings at least a little bit.
Taylor Talks Vegan 