Horny Ico said:
Can I help it if this arguement has been going on past my bedtime?
Hey now, it was just a joke! I didn't really mean you're a hypocritical terrorist who abducts perfectly happy animals just to kill them because you can't afford the food! Why must you take everything so seriously?
Well if you aprove of killing the especially dangerous ones, I fail to see our disagreements, with the obvious exception of size threshold. I find it very easy to hold back my urge to kill spiders when I know they aren't dangerous. About a month ago, my mailwoman was shocked to see that I tried to pick up a spider from my front porch (it was so small that it slipped from between my fingers) and asked, "You play with spiders?!"; and I said, "Only the really small ones." The whole truth is that I was only interested because I didn't recognize it. It seemed to have grey hair and the same poportions of a tarantula.
I take nearly everything quite seriously. It's a habit of mine.
I don't necessarily approve of the killing of dangerous spiders, because I have a lot of problems with defining what makes them dangerous. For example, a poisonous spider that
can kill a human won't necessarily be dangerous. It's the context of the spider.
The spiders you had living in your garage were a realistic threat because they lived in close proximity to you, couldn't be moved as they would presumably just return, and had a realistic chance of killing you in their self defense. I will happily accept you killing them.
However, if you encounter a spider that can theoretically kill you, but can easily be moved away somehow, then simply picking it up in a glass and removing it from the house seems a simple solution.
I wasn't necessarily objecting to killing spiders. What I was objecting to were people who see a spider and instantly think
Kill It. If you kill spiders that realistically threaten you, fine, I have little objection to that unless there is a way to avoid killing it that you just ignore.