So, here’s a quick and somewhat hilarious arachnid story.. without images because I don’t want to see pictures of an eight legged creature and neither do you. :) I’m putting it behind a read more for the arachnophobes. :) Click through to read it.
My kitties love to torture critters of any kind, and they are like attack cats when they see one. I call them my critter warning devices. I’ve rescued crickets and lizards, and I have dispatched spiders who came into the house with eight legs and now after the kitties found them, only have one or two left, I have even found the odd totally legless one..
A few weeks ago the little kitty found a huntsman which is a large non-venomous Australian spider – don’t google it trust me, your skin will crawl for hours – and even though they are non-venomous and I know that perfectly well, it does not change the fact that these things are huge, and they like to hide up high, which means often they can be found on or near the roof which means moving them outside is virtually impossible and killing them is very difficult.
Look, I’m a nice person. I’m live and let live. I’ve got to a place where I can accept non-venomous spiders in the chook pen. I even allow them to live on the fences and on the outside of the house. I don’t kill daddy long legs. I even had a lengthy indoor friendship with a non-venomous spider in the Redback family who was living in my lamp and deading all the white tails for me, until it died. I do miss that one.
But we have a clear contract with the larger slightly terrifying outside spider friends, and any venomous spider friends, if you come inside the contract states – you are going to get deaded more than likely by a kitty long before the humans spot you. And they are not so nice about it – they like to bat you about with a paw as long as possible. We humans will simply smoosh you, quick and probably before you even knew the smoosh was on its way.
That is the deal and I think for the most part it is a fairly good deal.
So, on the occasion of this huntsman, I called the other half to dead it.. what a mistake this was!
It had started to climb up the curtains, I had grabbed the kitty who was desperately trying to get to the spider, mewling pitifully. The Other Half whacked the huntsman with the nearest thing which happened to be one of my teevee remotes, and it fell on the floor and disappeared under the treadmill. Which sits right next to my recliner.
We took that treadmill *apart* and shone a torch everywhere because spider eyes will reflect back at you when you light them up with a torch – that is a neat trick to show the kids at night time, by the way. Did you know that?
We searched for an hour and could not find the thing. We checked all possible other exits. We looked outside my window, thinking maybe it had found a way out. We searched my recliner thoroughly.
We sprayed the places we could not look with spider spray. We ran the treadmill at high speed hoping it would come out. No dice.
And I was pretty annoyed, I’ll be honest, because there was no way I was going to be able to sit in my chair again until we found it. Plus I was thinking, hello, who hits a spider with a remote? And after some time biting my tongue I finally said that out loud, and then I said, you didn’t even hit the spider anyway. And he said he did hit it, and he picked up the remote to look, and there was spider goo on it.
So then he was like, it has to be here, it can’t have gone anywhere. And he started shining the torch on the black rug that is under the treadmill, and it was sitting right there blending in with the dark grey rug, dead as a doornail.
So the lesson here? Sometimes snark is useful. :) I would have moved out of my lounge for weeks if we had not found it!
I’ve heard huntsmen do have some venom but not enough to be really a problem for humans. I will tolerate daddy long legs inside but that it about all. When I was growing up, we had plenty of huntsmen inside and we never worried about them.
I don’t mind at all if you post pictures of the pretty eight legged critters. Did you know that huntsmans eat flies and other insects? i can never kill one, I’ll trap it in a jar and take it outside.
I never see teevee typed out like that anymore, everyone else types tv. TeeVee makes me think of those chocolate coated TeeVee snacks, the biscuit shapes.
Ugh. I’m not sure how I’d cope if I lived in a country with some REALLY big spiders. I nearly shat my pants when I saw my first false widow. If something as big as my fist ran at me, it would definitely be change of britches time! Although oddly I have held a tarantula. Go figure!