He Likes Sunbathing

Today, Boy and I went to the pool in our development for some late summer swimming. The water was freezing, but the company was terrific, and the sun was shining. After about half an hour we took a break and sat on a bench eating some snacks. Suddenly, something hit me in the chest with a thud. I was shocked and bewildered, and quickly realized it was in fact the largest fly I have ever seen. I guess it is what they call a horsefly, although I have no idea what it scientifically is called. This fly, which after running right into my chest circled around Boy and I for a few minutes, was, hands down, one of the largest insects I have ever seen. It landed on us occasionally, and I swear it was the size of a small rodent. When it landed on you, it had true heft, you could feel its weight on you. I won’t deny being a little creeped out, and I did continually wave it away from me, but naturally, the thought of ending this thing’s life never crossed my mind. Why in the world would it?

After a few minutes of this fly circling around us, it became evident that we were not the first people at the pool to have noticed it, and now a lot of eyes were trained on us, watching us deal with it. A few minutes after it encountered us, it landed on the concrete sidewalk about ten feet away from us. One of the local girls who was also at the pool, probably about ten years old, sat a few feet away from it, staring at it in disgust. She held in one of her hands a flip-flop. She looked at me, assuming that I would be in league with her on this, and she said to me, I hate flies, and she inched toward it raising the flip flop. I said in a calm tone, It’s not hurting anything, leave it alone. What I said must not have registered very much, as it is an unusual stance about insects so it usually washes over people at first. She continued to advance on it and raised the flip flop higher and repeated her statement, I hate flies. Before she got any further I said in a sharper, more urgent tone, It’s not going to hurt you. Please don’t kill it. 

Before I tell any more of this story, I think it is important to note that I am in no way telling this story to get kudos for saving this fly’s life. Asking people around us not to senselessly kill animals who are minding their own business is, in my opinion, the very least we can do, and is not something we deserve kudos for but is in fact a moral obligation. That being said, I will continue the story.

The interesting thing is that when I pleaded for her to not kill it, you could see some sort of flash of recognition across her face. It is probably likely that in her life she had never heard anyone plead for the life of an insect. And although she was about ten years old, which in the grand scheme of how we form our worldview is actually rather old, she is still young enough that simple truths like that can penetrate in ways that the psyches of older people don’t allow. A second after I pleaded for the insect’s life, and the flash of recognition happened to her, she looked at me and gave a little smile, looked back at the fly, and almost seemed to look at it with affection. After a few more seconds, she looked at me and said, He’s sunbathing! He likes sunning, doesn’t he? I said, he probably does.

Boy–who of course is no stranger to this rhetoric and is fully on the “don’t kill insects” team–none-the-less wasn’t so sure about my authority on this particular issue. “How you know it likes suntanning?” He asked me. I don’t, I said. But I bet it does, most people do. And then, looking at the girl again, I said, But one thing I do know is, it doesn’t want to die. Nothing wants to die.

The girl walked away, and over the next few minutes I heard snippets of her conversation with her friends, and she kept saying, The fly like suntanning, the fly likes sunning.  Kids are so receptive to these simple ideas, which almost certainly means they are universal truths that we are born with and culture shoos us away from.

The argument I always come back to in any sort of discussion about veganism, animal liberation, animal rights, etc etc, is that things don’t want to die. People can talk about humane conditions or slaughter, humans being natural carnivores, or even justify eating certain creatures of the sea because they lack certain elements of a nervous system, but sentient beings don’t want to die. Things want to live. Even insects. Even worms. Animals want to live.