Big for a Spider, Small for a Dog

I was sitting at home admiring my fresh pink nail polish and reading night fighting rules for my wargame on Saturday when I realised that I wasn't really paying attention.  All I could think about was a giant spider the size of a small dog.  You may have heard of this, it turned up on those sections of the media dedicated to absolutely freaking you out and giving the South American tourist industry a blow it may never recover from.

Apparently a naturalist found said spider and took pictures of it.  I saw some of them and it was pretty small for a dog but absolutely huge for a spider.  The good thing about it is that apparently it was so large the naturalist could hear it coming so there shouldn't be too much danger of the thing sneaking up on you unawares.  Actually there is absolutely no danger of this one sneaking up on at all because apparently the naturalist killed it.

This is the bit that stuck in my mind.  Giant spiders don't really rate a second thought.  In my imagination I would be disappointed if any spiders in the South American jungle were smaller than a pig.  It wasn't even the killing of it that affected me.  It was the fact that it was killed by a naturalist.  If the thing had been found by a hunter I would have expected the next sentence to be "and he killed it".  If it had been found by a corporation I wouldn't have been surprised if they had inadvertently built a carpark on top of it but it was a naturalist!  Somehow this doesn't quite fit with my view of the world.  It's like discovering that Sea Shepherd really only chases Japanese whalers away so they can harvest the minkes without competition.

Can you imagine if it was David Attenborough?  "I'm perfectly at home in this community of gorillas, which I have bludgeoned to death with a length of pipe."  This is not what naturalists do in my opinion.  Or at least if they do do it they have the good sense not to tell anyone.  David Attenborough may have left a trail of animal corpses across seven continents but he was careful not let any of it get on film.  One can't help wondering if there are a legion of traumatised camera crews hiding in caves in remote places living in fear that David will tap them on the shoulder for his next voyage of elegant exposition and hideous butchery.

Unsurprisingly there was a bit of an outcry when this news became known.  Well, I made a bit of an outcry when the news became known to me.  A colleague of mine at work proved to be remarkably insouciant about the pointless arachnid death.  She may even have said "good".  The naturalist went into full justification mode, pointing out that the spider had been euthanised so that a natural history museum in Guyana could study it.  Once the museum is finished with it the restaurant next door is prepared to perform an "autopsy".

I have to ask, how does one euthanise a spider the size of a small dog?  With a very large newspaper?  Euthanise brings to mind passing gently away by ones own request with one's loved ones by ones side and Dr Philip Nitschke discreetly gouging another notch in his belt in the background.  I find it difficult to relate any of that to a spider of any size.  I suspect the naturalist used the term "euthanised" because he thought the term "killed" might have negative connotations. 

I am glad that a museum gets to study what a dead spider looks like but if ever there was a time for tag and release surely this was it.  All over my home city of Sydney there are ibis.  These are the ugliest, grubbiest, most irritating birds imaginable.  David Attenborough is free to kill as many of them as he likes.  Yet almost all of them have some sort of tag on them.  At some point people (quite possibly naturalists) have grabbed these filthy creatures and attached labels to them.  I guess they're doing research but frankly the only thing they seem to be discovering is how many tags you can attach to an ibis (quite a few, they're not small birds).

If people are prepared to go to the effort of tagging ibis surely someone would be prepared to put a tracking collar on a dog sized spider.  Not me of course, I'm not going near the damn thing.  Apparently they're harmless to humans (although it might dangerous if they accidentally stepped on a child) but I for one am prepared to wait for David Attenborough's "Life of the Animals that Survived My Visit" to come out on the National Geographic Channel.  As you can see, I'm not actually prepared to act as a human shield to defend any giant spiders from rampaging naturalists but I will be quietly cheering them on from the sidelines.  The sidelines several thousand miles away from the jungles they live (and hopefully will stay) in.

Incidentally, if you google giant, spider, dog all you will get is multiple pages of some joker in Poland who dressed his dog up in a giant spider suit so realistic it frightened his neighbours into hysterics.