Ant Souls

I wrote this piece in early January 2011.

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I’ve finally moved into my little house in Santa Lucia, 2 blocks from the police station, hopefully the place where I’ll live for the next 2 years. It’s definitely an adjustment living alone…accordingly, sometimes I feel pretty lonely. So far though, I am much more content here than I was living with my 6-week host family. But feeling the freedom to do as I please is both a blessing and a curse.

I’m taking on a lot of new responsibilities at once right now. I’m learning how to buy stuff in order to support my basic needs, like soap, sugar, toilet paper, and toothpaste. I’m learning to cook, little by little, one experiment a little more complex than the last—I made mandarin juice today, fresh-squeezed even. I’m learning how to plant a garden, for real this time (as opposed to training): how to find tools, how to prepare the land, how to lay it out according to the kind of space there is, how to build a fence, how to make organic pesticides, and on and on.

        
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Most recently however, I’m learning how to deal with an infestation of ants. I’ve been obsessing over how to get rid of the ants for a couple days now, and I think I might be developing a bit of a complex…I dreamt about swarming ants last night, somehow coupled with the idea of the difficulty of learning Spanish, and it made for a bit of a restless night. It doesn’t help that the house has three or four Salvador Dali prints on the walls left by its previous inhabitant…

The ants show up in the house very punctually at 6 o’clock every night, just after sunset. At first I freaked out and tried to sweep them out immediately, stepping on many of their crunchy bodies in the process. But the little automatons just came scurrying right back in, despite being swept what must have felt like a mile away for them (proportionate to their body size). Yesterday though, I remembered that ants follow pheromone trails and this thought made me change my plan of attack.

I actually find ants to be fascinating creatures when they aren’t invading my home. Their brilliance as a species has an intensely interesting emergent quality to it. In their mindless swarming there exists a mechanism that allows them to do really intelligent things as a collective hive through the trial and error of those thousands of essentially unintelligent drones.

Ants leave pheromone trails behind them when they explore, chemicals secreted from some tiny gland hidden away in their exoskeleton-encrusted bodies, which is used kind of like a trail of bread crumbs to follow back to the nest. But pheromones also act as a trail towards the place being explored, so the more ants that happen to follow the trail, the stronger and more irresistible the pheromone marker becomes, turning the path into an ant superhighway.

Well, my house is not a superhighway, ants. And that is why I bought a can of RAID and you will all soon be dead.

As much as I think it is wrong to kill living beings, I also think that they come in different degrees of souledness. That is, depending on soul size (or the quality of consciousness), there are varying levels of acceptability in killing. I understand that this goes against many notions of egalitarianism and is therefore a kind of incendiary idea, but I’ve thought a lot about it, and it seems to make some sense.

For example, I would never kill a dog or a cat or a pig because they have relatively large souls, i.e. well developed consciousnesses (consciousnesses that more closely mirror our own), but I would kill and I have killed countless ants and mosquitoes without a second thought. Should I still feel some moral turbulence for doing this? Or am I correct in devaluing certain life forms on the supposition that their capacity for consciousness and therefore suffering, is inconsequential. At any rate, the idea of large and small souledness is taken from a book called I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter—check it out.

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So in the case of this particular ant infestation, I had no qualms about spraying insecticide all over the place. The ants as individuals really do not have souls in a meaningful way and I can kill them without feeling guilty. I am glad I did too, because now my house is pretty much ant and cockroach free.

The bats are another story though.