Co-existence ends with corn flakes

Originally published 23 January 1995

EXUMA, Bahamas — Sci­en­tists kill many ani­mals in the course of med­ical and bio­log­i­cal research, and most of us are con­tent that they do so. We are also con­tent that it’s not our­selves that do the killing.

We eat meat, but we are hap­py to let some­one else do the slaughtering.

We under­stand that deer herds must be culled for their own good, but we are unable to look down the bar­rel of a gun into the eyes of a white-tailed doe.

The ethics of inter­species killing is com­plex and sub­jec­tive. Life could­n’t exist with­out killing. Killing is the cre­ative engine of evo­lu­tion. Try explain­ing non-vio­lence to a great white shark. Or to a cholera bacillus.

Har­vard biol­o­gist E. O. Wil­son sug­gests that what he calls “bio­phil­ia,” the human love for oth­er species, is our best hope for sur­vival and hap­pi­ness on this plan­et. The trick is to dis­tin­guish love from squeamishness.

Cer­tain­ly, for many of us, not hav­ing to look the vic­tims in the eyes makes killing more palatable.

For­give me. These are late night thoughts, prompt­ed by soli­tude and dark­ness. For sev­er­al days I have been liv­ing alone in an iso­lat­ed house on a trop­ic island. My only com­pan­ions are a hum­ming­bird, two sala­man­ders, a dozen mice, and an appar­ent­ly inex­haustible army of ants.

I’ve giv­en a lot of thought to the ethics of inter­species murder.

The hum­ming­bird is cherished.

The sala­man­ders are wel­come, as long as they stay outside.

The mice — well, I start­ed off with traps, until I looked into their sad Dis­neyesque eyes, accus­ing me from beneath the sprung wire.

I put away the traps.

So that leaves the ants.

Tiny sand-col­ored ants, as small as grains of sugar.

I saw them first in the sug­ar bowl, a seething swarm. A line of march­ing ants stretched down the side of the bowl, across the cup­board shelf, down the wall, along the coun­ter­top, back up the wall to a crack in the plas­ter that leads to who-knows-where.

I dis­posed of the con­tents of the bowl. Then I took a wet sponge and oblit­er­at­ed the line of ants, all the way back to the crack, a clean mur­der­ous swipe that must have smushed a thou­sand lives.

A few hours lat­er the march­ing army was re-estab­lished, this time fixed on some crumbs I had inad­ver­tent­ly left on the counter.

Anoth­er swipe, anoth­er thou­sand deaths.

But now sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty was get­ting the best of me.

I care­ful­ly killed every ant in sight. Then I placed a pinch of sug­ar at a new loca­tion, and went for a walk.

When I came back, the march­ing army was re-estab­lished on a new course, anchored on the pinch of sugar.

Think about this for a moment.

From the crack in the wall, which may be far from the nest, scouts fan out look­ing for food. One of the scouts finds a source of nour­ish­ment. It finds its way home again, pre­sum­ably fol­low­ing some sort of chem­i­cal bread crumbs like Hansel and Gre­tel, where it com­mu­ni­cates the nature of its dis­cov­ery, then leads its myr­i­ad com­pan­ions back to the sug­ar, across a vast desert of walls and coun­ter­top criss­crossed with chem­i­cal tracks.

This sophis­ti­cat­ed feat of nav­i­ga­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion is accom­plished with a brain as tiny as the point of a pin.

I swept up the ants with the sponge and start­ed again. Mur­der had became research. I soaped down the walls and coun­ters to elim­i­nate chem­i­cal tracks. I put out bits of food and wait­ed and watched. I looked for scouts. I want­ed to see the march­ing army emerge from the crack.

I learned almost noth­ing. To have answered all my ques­tions would have meant giv­ing up read­ing and walk­ing and swim­ming and sleep­ing. But the ants always returned. My respect for them grew, and my sponge made its killing jour­neys with increas­ing reluctance.

Even in its tini­est man­i­fes­ta­tions, life and intel­li­gence are mirac­u­lous, beau­ti­ful. I wish I could take a few of these trop­i­cal ants home with me so I could put them under a micro­scope and look them straight in the eye, give them a face-to-face smile, engage their tiny formi­car­i­an minds.

Of course, it would not be an equal encounter. The ants are obliv­i­ous to me. There is a vast dis­crep­an­cy of scale. The ethics of killing has nev­er trou­bled their brains.

It’s just as well I can’t look them in the eye, because in the inter­ests of hygiene I keep swip­ing, keep killing, on a scale that seems stag­ger­ing but makes no appar­ent diminu­tion in their numbers.

The mice are dif­fer­ent — those sweet mam­malian eyes, glazed by death, look­ing up from the trap. Let them have the run of the place. It’s only a few days. We can co-exist.

Or so I said to myself in a moment of fool­ish sentimentality.

Then this morn­ing I opened my corn flakes and out jumped a mouse.

Now, I am sit­ting alone in the light of my lap­top com­put­er screen, med­i­tat­ing on the ethics of killing, wait­ing to hear out there in the dark rooms of the house the snap of traps.