An older couple that lives nearby had a tool I needed to borrow, so I drove to their house to see if I could borrow it.
Now, I should point out that neither one of these people has Alzheimer’s or any other cognitive disease. We carry on long conversations and they are both entirely lucid.
But…
What I saw at the front door horrified me:
right in the corner not three feet from the door was a growing paper wasp nest complete with about half a dozen of the buggers working on the nest.
I said something to my friend: “You do know there’s a wasp nest right near your front door, right?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s been there a while,” he said, “We don’t kill critters if we don’t have to. There’s one in the garage, too.”
Flabbergasted, I asked him, “Uh, you know those paper wasps can be kind of aggressive, right? They’ve been known to attack in numbers if they think their nest is threatened.”
“Oh, well, we don’t bother it.”
I also got to see the nest in the garage. It was right above the tool chest where my friend had to reach in and grab the tool I wanted to borrow.
I quickly got the Hell of there.
I just gotta ask all of you, 'WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?"
Letting potentially dangerous stinging insects build their nest right next to your front door is nuts; I don’t care what your religion is. I suppose if it were a nest of rattlesnakes you’d be okay with that too?
As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more Zen like with regard to critters and nature in general. I don’t hunt anymore and don’t really have a desire to go out of my way to dick with wildlife. Hell, I spend most of the time watching nature documentaries and a few weeks back I teared up assisting a Sheriff’s deputy dispatching a deer that had been hit on the side of the road.
Just not my thing anymore. Live and let live and all that.
Stinging insects on my house might be a bit much for me though. But I’d probably still feel bad.
Some people would say it is bipolar but no. Life is hard, cruel, and complicated.
Seeing a turtle try to get from point A to point B can depress me more than anything. To see one of God’s creatures moving slowly and doggedly about the grass.
I’m the same way but wasps in or around my house I’ll kill. Call me a tree hugger but anything else I enjoy watching and being part of more than destroying
I’m the same way, and haven’t even eaten meat in years because of it.
Stinging insects and scary spiders though, I kill the shit out of them if they are around the house or garage. Been bitten and stung too many times including a nasty spider bite with moderate necrosis around the bite.
I’m all about some animal love.
Hell, I thought I saw a kevlar laying in the street, it was a big ol’ Turtle so I picked him up and took him to a local pond/wetlands. I’m cool all about helping that Turtle.
I have a friend that has a cat that is so old it dribbles crap. Literally dribbles crap, all over the house.
I would give the Turtle a 5 mile ride in the truck to the wet lands sanctuary, honestly, I would shoot the damned cat.
People are nuts. Most people anyway. The ones who think they are perfectly sane are the ones I usually watch, they the ones who are all nice and chipper and friendly and then one day you find out they fed a family of eight to a wood chipper in their underwear while listening to Christmas music and eating some leftover pizza before getting in their late model hybrid and driving off the side of the mountain.
As far as wasps go, they can go and be waspy wherever they like as long as it far away from me, however once around or inside or on my home they get eliminated with extreme prejudice, sorry, but they bug me. No pun intended. Basically if I didn’t bring it willingly into my home I wish it to remain outside of it, once it comes in, well survival of the fittest and all that. I don’t go out of my way to take out wildlife, that said, I don’t let it suffer either, had a groundhog yesterday at the club, get into it with a dog and before we could grab the dog and pull her off of the groundhog the dog broke the little guy’s back paralyzing the back legs but not killing it outright. When it became obvious that he couldn’t do anything but crawl about we went and put him out of his misery and buried him under a tree where a few other ground hogs were buried do to similar incidents. Had a woman at the club later come who found out of the issue and got on my case and another guy who helped bury him for killing the wounded ground hog. “Could have been someone’s pet.” What you going to do?
But, what if the spider spend its entire life watching you thinking you were its greatest prey and thinking of how to catch you in a web and drain you dry? This goes both ways now.
