I saw this posted on another forum. I found it to be pretty interesting. Made me think. Thought I'd post it on here so DF can discuss this.

What do you guys think?



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I killed a bug and I wish I could say “I was I wasn’t crying”. Instead, I’m left to say “I just killed a bug. It’s only a bug, but I wish I was crying”. I feel for the ant, but no tears are coming out.

It was scuttling around on my closet door moving quickly. Every so often it would stop and rise up on four feet and feel around with its antenna. It was cute, like a rabbit. I would cry over a dead rabbit. Why not a dead bug? I am so culturally desensitized that all these things are just programmed into me? I ended a life, an actual life. It was just going along and I just didn’t want it there anymore. It was doing its life’s work…what it was born to do. I stopped its life’s work. I stopped a life.

Can lesser beings feel pain like we do? Is intelligence a virus?

Maybe the smarter you are the more intense your life is on the happy and sad spectrum. If we are smart enough to, on any whim, dim a bug’s life, is intelligence great? If we are aware of ourselves as conscious beings, is the ant aware too? What if it is not?

What would living be like from the ant’s perspective? If we do have the gift of living more deeply than an ant is it right to take its life?

Perhaps we as people, given the power of free will, (choosing whether to harm or help) – can choose to help. Animals do not know to help beyond their own selfish wants and desires.


I feel that humanity’s next step up on intelligent development will be as peace loving and spiritual beings. Not spiritual as in organized religion – just spiritual. Humankind has lapsed away from this and into more animal-like instincts and shallow living.
Shallow petty conversations, living life only half aware of the self, and being selfish are really just animal instincts of unintelligence. Animals do not like to share. Humans do share just to see the joy in one another; this is intelligence. This is thinking “I am a person. I am conscious of myself, who I am. Therefore this other person must be a conscious living being too: like me. All people are like me in this way. My suffering is their suffering. My joy is their joy. I can help other people because I realize we are all really the same.”

I guess this whole cyclical idea of thinking comes down to; what about that dang ant? Is its life equal to a human's, or for that matter mine?


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It's moronic. There's so many problems with this PETA-lovin' member's response, it's rediculous. I don't even want to bother to comment. Think I'll just sit back and wait for someone else to respond.

well it just depends on your morals, religion, and value of life. i personally do not kill bugs or any other type of life unless if it deserved or if it's for a greater good.
i do not think that tears matter in the sincerity, but if you trully feel bad about it, then yes in your case it is equal.

it doesnt matter if life is equal or not because we will all still kill bugs..

Say what you will, but if I find bugs in the house I take them and put them outside. I don't purposely go out of my way to kill anything for no reason and I am not a member of PETA (I think they are too extreme from what I've seen).

all life is meaningless. the actions of that life however have meaning. the destruction of the ant has an impact on the colony of ants it could be both postive and negative its undetermened. what if you were meant to kill the ant? how does that action impact both yourself and the socities in which both yourself and the ant exist?

so when a mosquito lands on your arm, you shoo it away?
(i dont think so..)

I haven't been bitten by one in quite some time, so I don't know, but then again I don't always notice it happening, so usually, no, I don't slap them.

LOL !! Sometimes I kill them and oddly sometimes I dont ?

Ive actualy dodged an ant instead of just stepping on it .
But yet I've gone to war with them and killed THOUSANDS !! with no remorse ,of course I was trying to save a tree ..

Spiders are K.O.S. around me but everyonce and awhile I go out of my way to put one out of MY SPACE ..

In fact the other morning On my walk to work for no good reason that i can tell at all I stopped and lifted 2 small worms out of a black top driveway of doom ( as I pictured these two frying in the mid day sun trapped on an endless dessert of man made block top ) and put them in the grass ,now there were other worms around but they didnt matter just these 2 ? WTF? but it seems to be how im wired ..

An Ive also put myself at risk helping the lesser critters because I felt it need to be done !

All life is not equal. If one chooses to not kill the ant based on their own personal perspectives, that's fine. But to consider an ant's life as important as a man's is just too extreme and based on personal sentiments, and it is without justification that is [/i]not[i] concerned with some spiritual attachment...even if the argument is, as was suggested, concerned with the "chaos theory" or some version thereof (that is, killing the ant may effect its colony, which thereby could effect the ecosystem, and yaddah, yaddah, yaddah). BOLLOCKS TO ALL THAT!

To think of an organism without any sentience whatsoever, without a mind, without any emotional context, with nothing more than instincts and chemical responses, as being equal to that of even a dog (where an emotional context can be implied) is worthy of a righteous laugh. HA!

I avoid killing living things if I can, I dont kill spiders I just put them outside and stuff... but I will smash a bee or a hornet in the house because i am allergic to thier sting. But this doesnt make me a PETA fag. I dont believe a bug life is as worthy as a humans life. Well ok theyre more worthy than someone like Tookie Williams or a pederast, but not as worthy as someone who isnt a psychopath.

Bugs are pests, if a monkey is grooming another monkey and finds a bug in his fur, the monkey eats the bug and kills it. It is natural to kill harmful parasites that make our lives uncomfortable, its Natural Selection.

I don't kill spiders though, they kill more of the other bugs than I ever could, I have a working alliance with them.

some version but not really that. existince without action is meaningless. a a grain of sand exists but its existince is meaningless. think of the old drop a rock into the water metaphor some ripples become tsunmi's some just fade away with no lasting impact (atleast that we may be aware of).

Lets say you kill the ant later you feel remorse so you go out to a bar meet a girl get married and have a child the child is the worlds next "Hister" big ripple. Lets also say the ant you killed was being followed by army ants that would have destroyed the colony so the ants death saves the rest of the colony another big ripple. I know the example is frought with diffrent interelated philisophical problems but you get my drift.

Basicaly the life of each, the killer and the killed, had meaning from the action, the killing, without the action both were meaningless relative to each other.

It's early in the morning, so I'm going to think this question over during my breakfast of bacon and eggs.

Everything living eventually dies. I don't feel pain or guilt when I kill something, but I do believe in karma. Call be superstitious, but why should I kill something? I guess you ask "why not?"

Jumping spiders freak me out, but I would rather live in that fear than squash it. It's not their fault they're all jumpy and creepy.

I don't think we are superior to other animals. I think all living things have knowledge and spirit. That doesn't make me a vegetarian mind you...meat is just too tasty.

You might be born to kill that bug over there. I don't think I was. If we all saved the bugs, then the balance might not work. If you kill the bug, you were probably meant to do it. If you didn't, then lucky you didn't because you weren't supposed to.

that ant has more of a right to live than you do.

you go around fucking up the atmosphere, throwing nonbiodegradable things into landfills, and generally messing shit up and that ant is doing his part to simply carry on what his species has been doing for millions of years....existing. you dont see ants creating toxic waste dumping grounds or hunting other species into extinction.

we are supposed to be the most intellegent species, we should know the value of life considering the majority of us are clinging onto it and hoping that we don't croak. if we were as smart as we say we are we wouldn't go around killing helpless animals.

lilywhite and 2+2=5, yall both are right (in my opinion of course)... we are "supposed" to be the most intelligent species. yet we are destorying the earth. so as of now i dont think human life has more value than a bug's life. humanity, as a whole, cant really say they value human life too much huh? things like cutting down rainforests that might have cures for diseases, releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that contribute to global warming, that later contributes to natural disasters that kill hundres of people every year.
if you look into nature, most species have symbiotic relationships with other species. it's quite peaceful actually. yes death occures alot in nature but, it has a purpose. there is no useless killing as we humans do (that includes: war, urbanization, global warming, pollution, etc,.)

The ant has never considered the process by which sugars can ferment into a pleasant poison. The ant has never cried after reading a short story. The ant has never felt that it would pine away from love. The ant has never stopped to consider that a dead leaf is beautiful beyond it's material being. The ant can't even knit a stupid costume and prance around at conventions pretending to be some sort of anthropomorphic animal. The ant sleeps and works as it is told and shits and fights and dies as it is told. The ants go to war and lions devour their mates and countless species kill their own young, and every plant that grows in the forest strangled a dozen others that never reached the soil that it could have that patch of growth. The difference is in the capacity and understanding, for an animal is capable only of little good and little evils, and a human being is capable of great goods and great evils. It is this capacity that produces greatness, not a difference of scale in good or evil; and the entire production would be without an audience otherwise. When those who had gone before asked if a tree falling in a forest made a sound, it was not the 'when-you-close-the-fridge-door-does-the-light-stay-on' jest of your childhood, nor was it to be taken literally, but to ask; what purpose any of this, if not to be observed? If we do not appreciate the sounds of music, what does it do but echo dimly into nothingness?

Some small handful of animals show real signs of sentience or near sentience. They might one day, a million years from now, be like us. Those who would revert to a lesser form of life are fools and slaves that cling to their chains, desperately afraid of the responsibilities of freedom.

At any rate, I'll have no more of the rich and spoiled children of excess bleating nonsensically of their ill-informed and ill-conceived opinions inspired by an insipid PBS special.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? - Shakespeare's Hamlet