Is it wrong to kill a spider? Surely the world’s big enough for all of us

Vacuuming the kitchen floor the other day, I disturbed a whopping spider lurking by the skirting board. On this occasion I vacuumed around it, suggesting that it might want to move outdoors in its own time.

What I should have done, I learn from Nick Harding’s guide to spider-proofing your home in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, was to eject it, using the glass-and-paper technique that also works well for confused bees and errant wasps (I have followed with dismay the vespicidal tendencies of Edwina Currie and her fellow wasp-botherers in the current Telegraph correspondence about these admirable pollinators and pest-predators).

But even wasps don’t divide opinion as sharply as spiders. When it comes to inspiring irrational human terror, spiders rival snakes – with even less justification. In 2022, the Telegraph noted that “deaths related to spider bites are virtually unprecedented in the UK”, yet a YouGov poll in 2023 found a fear of spiders the second most commonly reported phobia.

Evolutionary or learned – the origins of arachnophobia have provided material for innumerable scientific papers, without ever reaching a firm conclusion. But no invertebrate has inspired such a rich vein of fiction and myth, from the spider protagonists of A True Story, a 2nd-century AD novella by the satirist Lucian of Samosata, regarded as the earliest known work of science fiction, to the superhero, Spiderman.

Early depictions of spiders tend to be sympathetic: Ovid’s account of Arachne, the virtuoso weaver changed into a spider by the goddess Minerva, suggests the exiled poet’s own plight (weaving was a common metaphor for literary composition in Classical literature). Spiders appear as benign creatures in texts from the major religions – their webs offering sanctuary from foes, or symbols of the universe.

But the legend of Robert the Bruce and the persevering spider, promulgated in the 19th century by Sir Walter Scott, was something of an outlier in an era when the image of spiders went into sharp decline. From Little Miss Muffet, frightened off her tuffet by an intrusive spider, to Hardy’s Sue Bridehead, who spends her wedding night in a cobwebby cupboard – “What must a woman’s aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!” remarks her chagrined husband – it is a short scuttle to spiders as the embodiment of horror: the monstrous spiders of Tolkien’s Mirkwood and the menacing arachnids of Stephen King’s novella, The Mist.

Even such engaging characters as Charlotte, the heroine of E B White’s enchanting book, Charlotte’s Web (the source of my own arachnophilia), or Spiderman, the engagingly gawky teenaged superhero, have failed to restore the reputation of spiders as harmless, beneficial and beautiful.

For 30 years, London Zoo has been doing its best to change minds with its Friendly Spider Programme (“No animals, photographs or illustrations are used until the end part of the course”). This year’s sessions are fully booked, but while waiting for dates in 2025, spider-phobes dreading the seasonal invasion of arachnids might follow the tolerant example of Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby. Plagued by a maddening fly, he ushers it out of a window, remarking, “This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

Trigger warnings

They put trigger warnings on all sorts these days – plays, films, television programmes. But not (yet) in newspapers. Which is how I came to have an alarming flashback on reading that teachers at Ryde Academy on the Isle of Wight are said to have spent two hours measuring the length of 70 female pupils’ skirts.

Back in the mists of time when I was at grammar school, our uniform list specified the length of our frightful grey flannel skirts (“no shorter than 3 inches above the knee when kneeling upright”). Inevitably, we used to shorten the hated garments by rolling them over at the waist, trading a lumpy sausage of fabric at the midriff for a fashionable flash of thigh.

But the school was having none of it, and thus it was that we found ourselves kneeling upright on the benches of the science lab, while the (male) biology teacher went round with a ruler (and, it was rumoured, a certain creepy relish). Good to know that some ancient academic traditions have survived all attempts at modernisation.