When Pests Become Friends

(April 2004)

As I was preparing to teach a class today, I saw an ant on a paper towel that I had taken out of my pocket and placed on the desk. I wondered if it had hitched a ride in my pocket. I wanted to play with it, this lone small creature, many ant-miles away from any kind of food, surrounded by desks and chairs and computers and carpet. I let it scurry onto my hand, and all over my arm, quickly navigating what must have been to him a heavily wooded forest. He was moving too fast for me to relax and have any fun with him, and I didn’t want to let him disappear up my sleeve and give me a surprising bite during class, or crawl into my ear beyond the point where my littlest finger can fit. So I had to make the decision: Do I kill him, or do I let him go? Normally, if I’m inside and I see a lone ant, I quickly roll it to death between my thumb and forefinger. I use my left hand for this deed. I consider it my duty to kill lone ants, because they could very well be scouts, and even if this particular ant wasn’t sent out as a scout, he probably had the potential to become one, even in new territory. I decided that he could easily be the harbinger of our office’s first ant infestation, and so I gently transferred him to my right hand and then rolled him real good with my left.

And it hurt to kill him. I felt like I murdered him. Sort of.

While he was still alive, and had been crawling on my arm, I was strongly reminded of an old feeling. In my past 17 years as a student, during a boring class, an unexpected ant could become a most welcome pet. It would be a relief from the boredom, a living being on which I could concentrate, something with a will of its own, subject to my will. Because of the circumstances, it would suddenly become my pet, instead of my enemy. Any classroom was like a foreign embassy, granting immunity to the wandering ant.

As I sat at the chair in the office, I suddenly had that feeling all over again, of how I could be intrigued by watching this little intricate creature zip around my hand and defy gravity. Something that normally held little value to me became valuable in an instant. And it’s not that ants just held little value before, it’s that in a usual setting, I would kill one on the spot. I have killed hundreds of thousands in my lifetime, so much so that I can easily recognize the smell of the formic acid from their ruptured abdomens.

Now, an ant is an ant. The fact that this one was alone and happened to provide a respite from boredom didn’t make him any more of a virtuous insect. He was just there. And when it came to my decision, I still killed him. But then why the small flash of remorse, when all other times, there is none? Perhaps it’s because having him alone, I was forced to contemplate the complexity of God’s small creatures, and to realize that God is mindful even of that ant, and He even loves it, in a way. However, that doesn’t make it wrong to kill an ant, unless perhaps the killing is done out of malice.

I think there may have been another reason for the remorse I felt. Perhaps it stemmed from the illogical sentimentality to which most of us can fall victim, the kind of thinking that would endow that ant with qualities it does not have, simply because it belongs to me, even if only for the moment. He was my little friend, even though that’s not the feeling that went through his mind (if he has a mind, and if he was even a he). He was my friend, simply by circumstance, and only because of what went on in my mind.