Aaaahhhhh! Stop posting pics of spiders!!!!
I truly cannot stand them. My toes are curled up just posting in this thread. Hell, they curl up just reading the word spider.
I know they eat other bugs and if they stay outside and off my house I leave them alone. But build a web on my front porch or across the back door? DEATH!
Actually I can't even kill them I'm so skeeved out by them. That's a manly man job.
I think we are genetically predisposed to hating spiders. My family moved to West Texas where the natives are quite comfortable about some spiders, being as they outnumbered humans by a million to one. I was in biology class, and one hanging around the ceiling fell on my desk. He was an inch in diameter, and I screamed to high heaven. When everyone saw it was just one of those little every day black-and-white spiders common in dog-town, they started laughing and couldn't stop. I thought "What kind of people are these, anyway, don't they know spiders are BAD?"
About a week later, a couple of the boys who lived far out in the scrub brush of the great SouthWestern Texas plains brought two jars to school. There was a black bushy-looking tarantula in one of them and a larger brown spotted icky tarantula in the other. They wanted me to hold them so I wouldn't be afraid of spiders any more. I declined! They left it in the lab, and I would look at them from time to time. Finally, I decided I would try to hold one of them. It tickled, and it didn't try to bite me at all.
Even so, I've never loved spiders until I got interested in gardening. I did some reading up on insect control, and one of the books advised cutting down on insect poisoning when possible to keep carcinogens away from your home and replacing them with garden spiders and lady bugs, which eat all kinds of vegetable vermin. That kinda lit my fire about spiders. Because I've read up on bugs. All of them carry more disease types than a dog had fleas back when, and spiders control their numbers if you don't kill them all off. After that, when I found them in the house, I placed them outside to feast on protein.
Unlike Spoonman who shows true sensitivity, I dropped them out there and always glanced away, never thinking of them again. I still don't like them in my house nor the thought of them crawling over my sleeping body at night.
My Aunt Oma had a saying that my mother always repeated to me. She said "If kids make you nervous, don't look at 'em." That's exactly how I felt about spiders until I realized the little athletes are better at getting rid of undesirable bugs than sprays that can result in breaking down human tissue in the lungs when inhaled and causing cells to spin into self-destruction mode aka cancer.
Here's
sweet little miss spider Halloween pic to help you get over some of that innate spi-dred:
