Spiders may be helping us out, and up to a certain size I’m OK with that, but that ends when they surpass the size of the last knuckle on my pinky finger.  Or if they walk on my bed or (ACK!) pillow.  Then I have to get all up in their faces (or throw a book at them anyway).

I am all in favour of empathizing with the little critters, and I love dragonflies (voracious mosquito eaters that they are) but I can’t get on board with spider liking.  

Richard Dawkins famously said that humans are human DNA’s way of replicating itself.

The version I heard was “A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes.  This may be the purpose of the universe.”  That was Heinlein in ’73, right around the time Dawkins was working on The Selfish Gene.  It’s definitely an eye-opening way to think about evolution and our own cosmic significance, or shortage thereof.

Also: people who smugly assert that non-human animals are without what one might call “consciousness” (a nebulously defined term, that), always strike me as arrogant and potentially violent.  Like, the systematic kind of violence.

I’d prefer to err on the side of caution on that issue, myself.

/pets the cat

The first comment makes me think that a dragonfly is a dragonfly larva’s way to make more dragonfly larvae. We’re so focused on the imago-as-the-animal–why not consider the lifestage where the animal spends the most time as the animal?

ETA – Nevermind. I found it via his Vimeo site hosting the movie – “Composer : Gustavo Santaolalla From the Babel Soundtrack”

sad for the moth, but aren’t cats amazing in that sense — that even as domesticated animals, they’ve retained enough instinct that you can see the same behaviors in them as you see in documentaries of wild/big cats?  especially if they’ve had reason and/or opportunity to hunt.  our blue-blood siamese who came from a breeder is a total weenie when he sees bugs, at most fretting and furrowing his brow at them, immediately washing his hand if he dares to touch it — but our tortoiseshell girl who was a rescued and hungry stray gleefully hunts and devours them if we don’t save them in time!

beautiful little film — probably shouldn’t've watched it at work, though.

(something in my eye…)