The Accursed Double Quadruped

I have a profound respect for all living things, an abiding reverence for all God's creatures, great and small, a deep sense of kinship with everything that moves upon the Earth.

But spiders must die.

Because four legs is my limit. Wild boars don't bother me. Warthogs are fine. Grizzly bears could drop over and I'd usher them in gladly. But eight legs? Give me a break. That's just pure feet greed.

They're hideous. That's obvious. Nothing is more revolting than a spider, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, and when I run shrieking and waving my arms above my head (in a manly fashion, mind you), I want to make it clear it's not because I'm scared, I'm just grossed out. (I also flee spiders.)

But what really bothers me is their superpowers. Anti-gravity, for instance. You see a spider on the ceiling. You nail a couple of spongemops together so as not to have to stand right under it when it falls, and wham it at an angle from way off to the side, and what does it do? It falls onto you anyway, at a forty-five-degree angle, clings to your jugular vein and sucks all the life from your body. Nothing defies the laws of physics like a spider.

And you can hit it a hundred and thirty times with enough force to atomize a rock and it's still capable of running around at mach speed, unphased, and it would be just as lively if you used a phaser. Spiders have invulnerability.

Invisibility, too. If you whack one and it falls onto the floor, right at your feet, you frequently can't find it. You know it's right there. You didn't see it run. But it can't be seen. They say it's because, no matter how big it is, it can curl up into a little ball so tiny the human eye can't detect it. This is nonsense. I used to try that trick when the school bully was after me, but I could still be seen. And she wore thick glasses.

And web-making ability? What the hell is that? A thread comes out of its ass with a tensile strength the equivalent of titanium for its thinness, with alternating sticky and treadable strands so it can retrieve trapped prey without getting stuck itself, and we're supposed to believe it's from this solar system? I don't think so. (But then again, neither is Trump.)

(Have you ever walked through a spiderweb when you're passing under a tree and you set frantically to clawing at your face to get it off, spazzing out, panicking, and you look across the street and people are staring at you in alarm? They don't know you walked through a web. They just think you snapped.)

Spider advocates (a term akin to Nazi sympathisers) say the little arachno-demons are good to have around because they eat flies. Relatively speaking, this is like saying that pythons are great to keep near because they scare away mice. Personally, I would rather be submerged in a vat of thousands of flies than live in the same hemisphere as one spider.

So sorry, nature lovers. I believe in live-and-let-live as much as the next guy, but there's not room enough in my home for spiders and me. If I see one in my bedroom before I go to bed, there can be no sleeping until I find it. If I have to stay up for a month or two, so be it. That's why I bought the flamethrower. I sleep better with it under my pillow.

God made spiders, you say? And therefore they have just as much right to live as me? Tell that to The Donald when I've reduced him to ash.