Shared Bedroom with Said Spiders
Sure.. Kill them all in the DR where there's no law to protect our fauna
There're no dangerous spiders in the DR. But then, again you have to pick a
book and read about it. This may be a difficult task for some of you.
zeus
gre:
I was curious as to whether or not you have ever lived in the DR (I'm not being rude, just honestly curious).
I use to live in the Dominican Republic at an all-year-around boarding school about 5 min up the mountain from Jarabacoa during my high school education. My dorm was nothing more then a small bungalow that housed 12 American girls and 3 staff members. 12 girls sharing a single bedroom w/6 bunk beds, 2 showers, 2 toilets and 3 sinks. Our clothes and personal items were kept in open shelves for all to see.
These spiders infested our entire bungalow and the outside grounds, and they were poisonous. Not so much to kill but enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. One girl was even stung by a scorpion once. The staff told us to simply leave them be and we would be fine, so we did. Often we would merely swipe them off the wall/ceiling with a broom and sweep them outside, but there
were times when we had to resort to killing them, such as when they are in toilets (one actually fell in and was refusing to budge from its perch along the inside of the bowl so we had to flush it), when they lay a nest inside the house (unfortunately we can't move the nest outside or it would break and shower babies all over the house), and, as stated by others, in a vehicle.
Before you get upset, please understand our situation. Just as others have said, a spider that size poses a possible danger to both the passengers and civilians when a vehicle is in motion, especially when it is a venoumous spider such as these. Now we could simply try to catch it and release it, but there are far too many places for it to hide on a vehicle and too little time to search for it. The staff are not allowed to drive the vehicles so we are assigned Dominican drivers (don't ask why, because I don't know
), but no driver would get in the bus until they were sure that it was dead.
Sometimes it is necessary to kill. Killing any living creature just for the heck of it is cruel and unusual, but there
are times when it must be done. That is a part of life. Even the Dominicans will kill these spiders because there are so many of them on the island. The number of eggs in a single sac is almost over 300, and many people do not wish to have that many tiny spiders in their home.
I love spiders. I think that they are beautiful creatures that help our planet in unappreciated ways. I personally cannot kill a spider unless it startles me and I kill it out of a gut reaction, and even then I feel slightly guilty
. Personally, I admire your dedication towards the protection and well-being of our planet's natural wildlife. Heaven knows we need to worry more about the well-being of our planet instead of where to build our fourth
Walgreens or
McDonalds. I'm from Montana and have witnessed numerous amounts of forests being torn down just to build new, custom-made homes.
Our planet is sacred and we must take care of it just as we take care of ourselves. Self preservation is quite possibly the most basic instinct in any species, both human and spider. I believe that is a main reason that humans kill spiders. They see them as a possible threat to their well-being and wish to eliminate said threat for their own safety. That is why I kill spiders out of gut reactions. I don't realize what it is, only that it is foreign to my current state of mind.
Please remember that ~~anna~~ admitted that she no idea what kind of spider it was. Her and her family decided to play it safe and assumed that it was a dangerous spider so to prevent a trip to the hospital. You can't just sweep it out with a broom in that confined of a space and to simply reach in to drag it out, even with gloves, is a dangerous act. Perhaps if it was in a larger area or if she knew what kind of spider it was then she would not have killed it. She even admitted that she would have left it alone had it been on the outside of her vehicle.
I'm sorry for rambling, but I simply wanted to share my take on the matter as a former citizen of the Dominican Republic.
