On Spiders

Spiders are fascinating creatures.  It’s estimated that there are over 40,000 different kinds (and that number keeps growing) and they comes up with some of the most ingenious ways to hunt.  Seriously- humans aren’t this creative.  They’re also some of the scariest looking insects on earth.  8 legs, disjointed body, exoskeleton, many eyes, fangs.  Monstrous looking things.  The scare factor in and of itself fits them in the Halloween category. 

But, to increase the stigma, they’re also part of the massive hodgepodge of stories and myths in the Witch category.  They were rumored to be another type of witch familiar.  It was said they were a main ingredient in the deadly potions witches brewed.    People said they were witch spies: hiding in the corners and rafters of houses, collecting vital information, and then bringing it back to their witchy masters.  Plus seeing a spider, just about anywhere, was considered a bad omen.

Lucky for spiders, there’s way more of them than there are humans so they didn’t push the envelope of extinction like their feline friends.  Plus, several of those 40,000 plus species live in places where humans do not.  And that scare factor I mentioned earlier make a lot of people too scared to go near them let alone kill them.

I often wonder if they get confused when they see people purposely decorating their houses with cobwebs when they spend the rest of the year destroying theirs.