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Killing insects out of fear?
dantepw
Veteran
Hello! 
I am really scared of bugs. I used to be afraid even of the small/non-harmful ones, but with time, practicing buddhism, I was able to peacefully live with them more and more.
Anyhow, sometimes weird bugs get in my room and I am too scared to grab them and throw them out (I don't know whether they could bite me or not) and I end up killing them.
My question is:
How much of a bad karma is this? Do you guys go through the same when you are in contact with any kind of insects?
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Comments
For me, the question comes down to 2 things. First, what do I define as sentience, and which creatures fit that description. Second, what is the risk or inconvenience?
You can only do the best you can. It's not possible to live without other beings dying. It's best (I think) to avoid purposely killing whenever we can. We got a bug vacuum (which is sold as a kids toy) and we suck up insects that we don't want in the house and then release them outside. Biting flies and mosquitoes don't always get a pass due to reflex, but I try. They spread some horribly disabling diseases (and ticks, to) so I'm a bit conflicted on whether killing them is good or bad, as it's possible it prevents disease and suffering for other humans and animals. I just try to do my best, and if I don't, then I try next time.
Couldn't you use a brush and dustpan or something? My spiders come out to watch TV sometimes, I am lazy with hoovering so their webs stay up for ages.
@dantepw
There are mini vac's made to capture without harming, hand operated grippers with soft bristles that kindly grip bugs for removal but I usually just use a glass and a post card to cover and contain if I need to remove one from my house. (My partner is allergic to wasp stings and we live in a hundred and ten year old house that they love to nest in).
Karma/ shrarma/ Just consider doing it as a mindfulness practice of attempted harmlessness.
Hypocrites admission #
I do end up killing mosquitoes that end up in my tent. I have found that the process of kindly trying to remove them usually just allows more in.
Don't worry about karma, it's what Experientially happens for you is the indicator.
I feel bad if I kill anything. It never used to be this way, it's sort of progressed to this. Don't know why.
Do what feels like the right thing to do. Remember it could be your fear that's the issue and not the bug.
Look into your fear, observe it.
Best regards
for me it depends on the bug. Cockroaches, mosquitos, or termites must be dealt with for example.
Spider companions and web tolerance is not always possible but I try and convince family they are friendly natural fly control mechanisms. Bit different in for example Oz where they have lethal TV watching insects . . .
Today exposed many insects to their death whilst gardening. I consider it an offering to birds like the robin. Yep dharma hypocrite here too . . .
The extremes of ahimsa
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa
are not possible, realistic or required for most of us. They are as @how mentions sometimes impractical . . .
I must admit spiders do not seem to have any preferred TV viewing preferences, even with all those eyes . . .
Hi everyone!
Thanks for all the responses, very enlightening!
I am willing so much to take one of those bug-vacuum! I hope I can find one here in Brazil, it would be extremely useful. This would avoid many insect-deaths around here, ha.
Peace out friends!
There must be a joke in there somewhere....what do spiders like to watch on TV?
Reruns of "The Addams Family"
Some of these 'new awarenesses' take time to mature into more skillful means, as they say. Slapping a spider crawling up your arm is not something you consciously do, in fact, it is a reflex built into the system. Your homo sapiens body is built to do this.
That said, I've found that I react less and less as time goes by. I have found SMALL spiders on me and avoided smashing them to death. Big spiders? No promises.
I have to deliberately murder fleas and house flies by the billions in spring and summer.
Last summer, I got West Nile Fever from being careless about allowing myself to get bit so much. I'm one of those who taste good to blood suckers, I'll get fleas before my cat! I get mosquito bit first. I don't have one but am considering an electric 'zapper' but I don't want to kill the moths and long legged flying things, so forget that. I just have to bathe in mosquito repellent and get my window screens fixed, however futile that is thanks to having a cat who scratches holes in them.
@Vinlyn makes an extremely reasonable point about how killing things is on a continuum. How much a critter suffers is closely related to their sentience. Some bugologist out there must know how pain and suffering are experienced by bugs. Perhaps do your own 'research' and inform yourself that way?
The killing of insects motivated by fear?
I reckon that's always the reason, except in those societies where people eat them.
Bugs seen to avoid dying so I'd wager they know they are alive. But hey it's just an assumption.
I think what's more important is what the killing does to the person doing it.
I will kill flies and mosquitoes, for the most obvious reasons.
Sorry, but I am not willing to permit them to possibly affect and infect others.
As to everything else, plastic cup or glass, card and open door.
There MIGHT be. Research people are endlessly creative in figuring out ways to measure what looks hard to measure. Off the bat, you'd have to measure a lot of other things before you could even begin to measure an insects 'suffering'.
Apparently plants 'call' to one another with molecules of scent or other hormone-ish molecules. They even call for help. When you are out picking tomatoes, and you smell that tomato plant smell as you pull the fruit, that is a tomato plants HELP MEEEEEE .
It's a HUGE stretch to assume when the tomato plant cries HELP MEEE with it's tomato smell that it is similar to when I scream HELP MEEEE. I think the massive gulf between the meanings of HELP MEEEE is worth exploring, for the sake of our morality. But until we know for sure, which isn't likely, it's not likely I'm causing the tomato plant similar suffering as when someone tries to remove one of my fingers.
Pluck 'em!
It is too advanced to find nourishment in moonbeams . . . come to think of it I am not even a breatharian . . .
I iz cruel . . . I am veggie abuser?
Save the tomato! Aubergine Power! Free the Cabbage!
I've seen fast motion shots of bean shoots growing and they appear to have purposeful direction in their growth.
I was gearing towards not suffering but sentience as in aware they are alive.
Even if I didn't feel suffering I wouldn't necessarily be ok with dying.
It's amazing and humbling how little humans actually know. About anything.
Define 'aware'.
I seriously love plants, and I talk to my garden all the time, and I thank it for letting me pick it's fruits and roots, lol. One of my favorite things is when the pea tendrils start to seek out something to latch onto. I give them a hand and it's fun to sit a minute and notice the tendril sense your finger and wrap around it. Love plants. I really should live in a place where plants grow more than 4 months a year...
Mosquitoes even occasionally I will brush or blow off or wave them away. Biting flies I haven't gotten to that point yet, they bite so hard, and always on the ankles and man does it hurt. They get a smack as a reflex. I'm not sure how to manage them. They remove chunks of skin. Ticks get no mercy
For the most part, we just try to prevent attracting them to start, which works...ok.
Last fall I thought I saw a mouse in our basement but wasn't sure. We set a live trap and checked it daily for weeks-nothing. Forgot about it. Bet you can see where this story goes. Many weeks later checked it, dead mouse. Poor thing, it was tiny, just a little guy. Fail.
"Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively."
Even that definition is rather imprecise.
I live in Florida, there's no way I can't avoid not killing mosquitoes, and ant. as for other bugs, as long they don't bother me I leave them alone.
I'll wager the insect does not know it's alive. In order to know it was alive, it would have to have an awareness of different states of being than the one they are in, such as 'not alive'; and it would have to have a rudimentary sense of 'self', with an ability to project itself forward in time and imagine what is not there. I've probably got something wrong in there . . . but anyway, the nonhuman creatures who can do these things are higher order mammals and some birds (maybe). It takes a certain development of neurologic system complexity, and there are lots of critters that don't even have brains, like @lobster. What potential can be evoked when you don't have a spinal canal? Not much compared to a vertebrate creature.
One thing I can't shake loose with logic (as it were) is I intuit that even earthworms 'love' their life. Not lovey dovey, but cherish it. Just about everything is built with the ability to avoid pain. But they don't 'think' about it, they'd have to think like you and me and no other creature has quite our brain development. They just avoid pain when there is pain (or whatever more basic, general word instead of 'pain').
I get that inspired feeling sometimes, when I realize I don't know sh*t about something or other. Usually, I didn't know that I didn't know there was anything there to know, but suddenly, there's something new. I even get a sense of 'comfort' knowing that I don't know, or WE don't know but I've had to go through some mid life hell to get there lol.
Here in Switzerland, we have the ugliest spiders.
They're probably not the ugliest, but coming from a big city, and being used to having pollution spare me the charm of acquaintance with bugs, it was here in Switzerland that I first had to learn to hobnob with spiders.
I was scared to death -they're so big- but killing them just because I'm scared is not an option.
So I learned the cup-card-door technique.
After sixteen years, I got to like the little arachnides so much, that I use my own hands.
The fringed benefit is that rescuing spiders makes me look like some sort of Super Boddhisattva Woman in my son's eyes...
Did he make that - ?! That's really impressive!!
Ever since embracing Buddhism a year ago, I avoid killing insects (I've swatted many in my life). I now try to brush them away. My husband, however, really bothers me because whenever he captures any living insect or even earthworms, he feeds them to his pet puffer fish. His fish will eat them alive. Sheesh
I do feel sorry for people in Oz who have a fear of spiders. Some of the huntsman I see around my house are almost the size of my hand! (harmless btw)
My wife has adopted my approach to non-harm. She leaves them all be except for red backs which have been known to kill humans in the past. Our shed is full of the little buggers!
National karma at work?
See, I would rather live in the near-arctic (ok, that's somewhat of an exaggeration, lol)than live in an area where the creepy crawlies can kill you. I love the tropics and the desert, but I totally could not live there.
@Hamsaka " In order to know it was alive, it would have to have an awareness of different states of being than the one they are in, such as 'not alive'; and it would have to have a rudimentary sense of 'self', with an ability to project itself forward in time and imagine what is not"
I don't think it needs these contrasts to know it's alive. Example is I know I'm alive, I exist. I don't need any projections or imagination. It's a sense or feeling.
If I suddenly popped into existence here and now. I would know I exist. So why couldn't a bug or insect?
We don't know if a brain causes consciousness or not. A single cell amoeba can build a house out of grains of sand. No brain, no vertebra.
No one in the world can explain what consciousness is or what brings it about. So how can we say bugs aren't sentient? Haha.
Earthninja said:
Because you are a HUMAN. Your self awareness is a function of your big ole brain. You couldn't be aware of yourself without it. I believe higher primates like gorillas, orangs and chimps have a sense of self, and to a degree several other mammals like dogs.
I think I know where you are coming from. You aren't associating your functioning self awareness to your brain, but to a non-local 'mind' perhaps? Even neuroscience is unsure exactly how far the brain can be mapped as the 'source' for this or that -- but they have a lot of data associating certain activities, right down to, say, thinking about food, as occurring in specific brain regions (or several regions at the same time).
It seems we CAN associate a lot more of our experience to specific brain areas, but this field is in its infancy so all we have is the connection, in watching the brain react, but not much more than that.
You know you're alive because your human brain is complex enough for that kind of abstract function ("I exist"). When a brain is just a nub of neurons, the complexity is low and the functions will be similarly 'low'.
You and I have to agree on the basic premise that our experience is in large part dictated by the complexity of our brain before we can even have this discussion
but if we don't agree, then we end up talking apples and oranges. That said we DON'T have to agree, and if we don't, we can't very well discuss this 
.
Even if the awareness isn't there in the sense that we possess it, it bothers me on a moral level to know that even if it is biological reflex, beings recoil from pain and attempt to avoid capture or injury or death. They respond to poisons even, and other perceived threats, whether they are aware of why they are doing it or not. Just that recoil is enough to make me stop and wonder, regardless of what science can or cannot prove and it's not something I want to be an active part of such as children burning bugs with a magnifying glass in the sun or a minnow flailing after being hooked as fishing bait. It still feels wrong to me regardless of what the scientific basis is or isn't. And for me, when something feels wrong and I do it anyhow, it feels exponentially more wrong. I don't expect everyone else to have the same experience as I do, of course. But I try to go more by how I feel than simply looking for scientific, logical reasons to continue doing something that doesn't really feel right.
And yes I'm more referring to the non localised conscious awareness of existence.
Humans can do more than simply know I exist, we can question our existence. Hence enlightenment.
But I am not so sure insects don't know they exist. The ONLY reason we know we exist is that we are conscious of it.
Is the consciousness a function of a brain? We don't know the answer to this. We can't explain what consciousness is.
You are associating thoughts with areas of the brain, like food. But what I'm referring to is not the thought. I exist.
But the sense or awareness. It's prior to thought. Thoughts take place within it.
All I'm saying is that because we don't even know what consciousness is. It's folly to say it's our brain that causes it. Therefore killing insects is ok because they are unaware they exist at all.
There are some interesting studies in transplant patients who have clear memories and experiences linked to the donor. Including bone marrow transplants.
We can't explain dreams, or consciousness. These are our two most fundamental states of knowing we exist at all. It's never been proven these are caused by the brain.
Thanks for your thoughtful and engaging discussion with me!
That's funny
Creepy crawlies is what some Artic folk call polar bears because when they are creeping up on a seal breathing hole ( or a rig worker stupid enough to take out the garbage at the same time every day..Yes polar bears understand time & schedule because their hunting often depends on knowing when their prey will surface for air.) they will belly crawl forward on the snow while covering their black nose with a white paw.
I have been somewhat apprehensive about moving to Phoenix, Arizona this fall...mostly due to the scorpions (not to mention rattlesnakes), but then I remember that I lived in Bangkok where I actually saw a cobra along the street one day. It's all a state of mind!
'just a little guy' - exactly so, just as seals and bears are 'big guys'.
Insects are weird guys . . .
In other words appearance, intelligence, habits are something we have compassion for. Killer scorpions or spiders with lethal bites, ticks that burrow into our living being . . . all part of evolution . . .
Do we just prefer the cutesy animals?
So I feel we can befriend animals, personally I even eat them, which is really perverse or just part of the way things are. Yep bad Buddhist, eats friends [lobster hangs head in shame and tries to hide his collection of sardine cans]
Dukkha is a fact of existence, why make it worse for anyone? Even the little guys . . .
OM MANI PEME HALIBUT
For what it's worth, I do feel bad for the less cute creatures as well. And really, when you look close, many insects are quite beautiful with their colors. Also, the littlest ones, cute or otherwise, bite the hardest, lol.
It warms my heart to see a conversation about the moral benefits of not squashing bugs and if they're aware beings capable of suffering and deserving of compassion.
I'm not saying it doesn't seem a little bit surreal and sorta..out there. Just heartwarming.
There are over 4500 species of cockroach worldwide and just a few species have adapted to our living environment and are seen as pests...In their natural environment they are very beneficial recyclers ....
"Basic entomology can be interesting and fun-
But finding out how insects live is not for everyone!
Some people have a phobia about things that creep & crawl,
but if they took time out to study them, they would have no fear at all!"
This specimen was given to me back in 1980,it was a Xmas gift, I had just started work as an urban pestologist back then for "Flick"..(My motto back then was "The more you learn the less you fear" and it worked I soon overcame my phobias regarding Aussie wildlife).Fortunately I never came across any when doing house inspections...They are quite aggressive spiders and will attack you by running at you with fangs reared...The male Sydney funnel web is more venomous than the female, which is unusual for spider species ...
I'm not afraid of bears or wolves, but unfortunately spiders will send me running the other way. We don't have venomous ones here (at least not venom that affects humans) but we have dock spiders. Eek. But, on the plus side, they never have to worry I'll kill them because I'll never get that close to them!
In "their territory" I don't kill insects or snakes or the like. When I take my semi-daily walk, I avoid stepping on ants I see.
But, when they come into my territory, tough luck for them.
And most of you will do the same under the right circumstances. Let's test it and infest your homes with bedbugs.
I've encountered tarantulas outside but not yet inside. So how well I could/would get them outside is as yet unknown.
I think people just need to accept the fact that when it comes to not killing, we have to do the best we can and otherwise get on with life. For instance, I have 3 dogs and last summer someone brought over a flea-infested visiting dog. I spent the next three months using every lethal weapon available to wage genocide on the little biters in my house and infesting my dogs. And I didn't feel guilt or sympathy over the thousands of fleas that died under the flea shampoo and flea bombs. Neither did I blame the fleas for doing what nature demands. I did blame the person who knew their dog had fleas before they came over and tried to educate them on courtesy.
Yet, what makes any other bug more deserving of my efforts to avoid killing? Selfish reasons. Not wanting myself and the dogs to be eaten up with disease carrying flea bites.
Yes, I'm with you on that, and will add fleas to my list of 'permissibles due to cross-contamination and infection'....
Leeches are another that make my "I'd rather not, but I will kill them if I have to" list. One leech isn't so bad, pluck it off and let it go where people don't swim. But sometimes, the mamas birth their babies all over your foot and there is no way to get them off safely. Hundreds of leech babies stuck on my skin just is beyond my capacity for "let them be" at this point.
I agree. We do the best we can but within acceptable reason considering the risks to ourselves, others, and other pets/animals. I probably need to do a lot of Buddhist confession, lol.
I used to attend a public Buddhist sitting in Vancouver's hardest part of town. There was a thick carpet where we all sat on zafus for meditation. One day after our sitting, the person leading this sitting said that the building would be closed next week for work that was going to be done to it. When I asked what work was going to be done, she said they had a serious infestation of Bedbugs throughout and it would have to be fumigated.
I am embarrassed to say that I was so flummoxed by the fact that they would let people sit there without warning us before hand, that I was dumbstruck.
Both I and my attending friend independently removed our clothes on our front door steps when we got home...And neither ever went back to where a Buddhist leading these sits thought that this was OK behavior.
Are you AFRAID or do you have aversion for them? I used to think I was afraid of spiders but now I realize I was just really grossed out by them and hated them. I do compassion med and often I include them in it, I'll never like them but they are sentient beings who fear pain and death as we do and just want to be free from suffering like all beings, they are just going about their life as I am mine.
If one came really close to me or it was MASSIVE and I had no one to deal with them, then I would probably kill it - I don't want to - be it would freak me out so much! I'm luckily British so house spiders tend to be not so big have no idea what they are like in Brazil, eek!
EDIT - Wow, I'm quoting myself - that is a new level of egoism lol. I meant to add this into my other comment but pressed the wrong button :P
I just leave them alone, or put them outside, since I know what kind of insects they are and know that they aren't harmful. Never seen a harmful insect in the house personally. Thus, no fear if one of them gets into the house. Perhaps you could learn about the insects in your area and learn what kind bites and what kind doesn't, etc. That way, when you encounter one that isn't harmful you don't have to worry about getting bitten by it, etc.