Page 31 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #10

Some people tell me that killing the odd
“ It’s time we learned
to love the spiders
in our bathtub and
ants on our patios.”
by predators, the toxins pass up the food
chain. Hedgehogs, frogs and birds such
as song thrushes are all affected, yet the
poisoners turn a blind eye. These predators
need your understanding and your garden
needs slugs; they play a vital role breaking
down detritus and recycling nutrients.
Wasps are important pollinators and
predators. Spiders eat a lot of insects and are
themselves a tasty snack for predators further
up the food chain. “All these animals are Pand irresistible fancies. Certain
needed and all of them play vital ecological
roles,” says Paul Hetherington of Buglife.
“Yet we demonise them. I really think we
need to be more understanding.”
I blame garden centres. Garden centres
are purveyors of the fake and the sterile.
Just as trashy magazines promote a skewed
reality of impossibly beautiful women
with impossibly successful lives, so too
garden centres sell an image of impossibly
perfect plants. They are not nibbled, wilting
or brown around the edges. They are not
dusted with insect eggs or laden with
invertebrate stowaways.
Indeed, a friend once told me that when
he worked at a garden centre, any snails
October 2018
that were spotted were removed and
then lobbed into a bucket of salty water.
Garden-centre plants are rather like
the Photoshopped models of women’s
magazines; retouched to the point where
they no longer reflect reality. Real plants are
not uniform and blemish-free. Outside my
window, a straggly buddleia, or ‘butterfly
bush’, lolls lopsidedly onto the patio. Its
leaves are pockmarked due to mullein moth
caterpillars, but that only makes me love it
more. I like my perfectly imperfect garden
the way it is; warts, snails, slugs and all.
erhaps it’s no surprise that these
animals are attracted to our
private and public spaces, when
we fill them with such delicious
slug species, for example, are attracted to
the fresh shoots of newly sprouted plants,
as this is what they have evolved to eat.
“We breed vegetation that smells nice to
them,” says Jon Ablett, a senior curator of
molluscs at the Natural History Museum.
“We plant spineless plants that are easier for
them to eat. We remove the weeds for them
and we till the soil so it’s easier for them to
move around. We make our garden a nice
place for slugs to be. We might as well put
up a neon sign saying: ‘Slugs! Get your free
all-you-can-eat buffet here!’”
It is ridiculous to think that we can
segregate plants from invertebrates. It’s
invertebrate apartheid and it needs to stop.
insect here or there matters little when
you consider how numerous they are, and
that insects don’t feel pain anyway so “it
really doesn’t matter”. But these arguments
hold no water. A study of German nature
reserves last year found that three-quarters
of flying insects have vanished over the last
25 years. It’s been dubbed an “ecological
Armageddon”. The UK is one of the most
nature-depleted countries in the world. We
should be turning our gardens into wildlife
havens, not wildlife deserts.
Nor does the knowledge that other
invertebrates are faring better give us the
right to kill them. Although no one knows
for sure whether invertebrates feel pain –
and it’s likely they do, since pain is one of
the oldest and evolutionarily most important
sensations – this too is a moot point.
The thoughtless, blasé fashion with
which people swat flies, poison slugs or
squash spiders perpetuates the mind set
that these animals are worthless. This is
wrong. Children pick up on these cultural
biases so it becomes a dangerous attitude
that transcends generations. We should be
inspiring our children and each other to
tolerate and live alongside the species that
share our domestic ecosystems.
It’s time we stopped vilifying these
animals and instead begin to appreciate
them for the evolutionary marvels that they
are. It’s time we learned to love the spiders
in our bathtubs, the ants on our patios and
our motley ragbag vegetable patches.
I’m not proud of the ant incident on my
patio, but can report that a few days after
I lost the plot, the colony had recovered.
I’m pleased. I acted without thought and
allowed emotion to trump logic, yet our
past actions need not define our future
behaviour. We’re all conflicted over the
way we treat these ‘pest’ species, but it’s
never too late to adopt a more relaxed
attitude. Next time I disturb an ants’ nest
I will think before I act… then replace the
plant pot and leave them alone.
HELEN PILCHER is a science writer,
lacklustre gardener and author of
Bring Back the King:The New Science
of De-extinction (Bloomsbury Sigma,£16.99).
WANT TO COMMENT? How should
we ‘manage’ the so-called pests in our
domestic ecosystems? Email us at
wildlifeletters@immediate.co.uk
BBC Wildlife 31