Contemplating the lives we smush

When my kitchen became infested with ants this summer, as it does every year, I put out ant traps, which, in another annual rite, did exactly nothing. So I did what I always end up doing — inefficiently smushing the ants one by one. Sometimes I'll massacre dozens at a time in a fit of pique after catching them glutting themselves in my sugar bowl, but then, seeing a single ant moping around on the counter looking sort of forlorn and hangdog, I'll hesitate. He looks like maybe he's not having such a great day already. Getting smushed is the last thing this guy needs.

Dispensing death and clemency capriciously gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

Ants do not seem like very complicated animals to me (I'm sure E.O. Wilson would correct me), but every time I smush one I am aware that I am extinguishing for all eternity one being's single chance to be alive. It's hard to believe Descartes convinced even himself that animals were automatons; watching an ant scramble frantically to escape my annihilating thumb, he certainly looks every bit as conscious of his own mortality as I am.

Living in a cabin in the country in the summer, I end up having to kill a lot of things. In this, as in so much else, my 16-year-old self would be disappointed in me. At that age I thought maybe Jainism was the religion for me. All I really knew about the Jains was that they carried little brooms with them everywhere to sweep insects out of their paths, lest they accidentally step on a single bug. As a kid who used to spend most of his time at pools rescuing flailing beetles from drowning, this appealed to me.

I note that Jainism originated in India, a country to which stink bugs are not indigenous. The stink bug, an invasive species, has taken over the Mid-Atlantic region, including my house, in the last few years as swiftly as the Martians conquered England. It was from stink bugs that I learned that any animal in sufficient numbers can be horrific. An effective stink bug trap can be constructed out of a two-liter soda bottle and an LED, but I find it more thorough and meditative to eradicate them through piecework, using the nozzle of my vacuum cleaner. They make a very satisfying thhhhhP! sound when you suck them up. They then get to live out the rest of their lives in the oubliette of the vacuum bag. So my compassion is not quite Buddha-like in its embrace.

Mice are a stickier moral problem. Mice are mammals and, it has to be admitted when you look at them in the light of day, cute. In an ideal world I would be content to coexist with mice. But my Gandhiesque live-and-let-live attitude hardens into a more Fleming-McCartneyesque one when I go to enjoy my first cup of coffee of the day and find a tiny, black turd in my mug. So begins a wearisome cycle of vengeance and remorse.

A traditional mousetrap is designed to function like a guillotine, killing instantly and painlessly, but human technology is imperfect. Having to dispose of the limp corpse of a mouse first thing in the morning is a depressing chore with which to begin the day, but God forbid you should find the mouse alive, bleeding, maimed and crying on your kitchen counter.

A bug may be a small, unimportant thing, but maybe killing or saving one isn't. Every time I smush a bug I can feel myself smushing something else, too — an impulse toward mercy, a little throb of remorse. Maybe it would feel better to decide that killing even a bug matters. Does devaluing tiny, insignificant lives lead to callousness about larger, more important ones, like a karmic broken-window theory? People running for cover on the ground must look antlike from a bomber or a drone. As flies to wanton boys.

This summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill en masse without qualm) down to the dumpster at the end of my dirt road. I went to lift up the heavy lid of the dumpster, and what did I find in there but two miserable-looking raccoons huddled together in the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn't have been in there long, or they would've roasted to death in the summer heat. The floor of the dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed watermelon rinds and other amuse-bouches of filth. Still, they must've had a bad night; they looked scrawny and matted and sad.

What I had here was a Situation. I put down my bag of garbage and turned off the car. I trotted off to a shed where I found just what was needed — a piece of lumber about six feet long. Raccoons may not grasp the concept of favors or gratitude but they instantly grasped the concept of the ramp; I hadn't even lowered it to the dumpster's floor before one of them reached up and grabbed it with his paws. I set the board down and backed off fast. They both clambered up it, crawled across the dumpster's rim, plopped to the ground and slunk back into the woods. See? I thought, I am a good person. I am helping.