Harrison Christian: Quick deaths don't bug me

It's bad practice to squash a cockroach, writes Harrison Christian. Photo / File

Opinion

I've exploded the bodies of a thousand bugs this summer. The Buddha is always an afterthought.

I'm not a violent man. I can summon several yoga poses at will. I also keep to a vegetarian diet, more or less.

But when I see a three-inch-long cockroach on my bedroom wall, moving along in little bursts and feelers working, I reach for the Dalai Lama's autobiography.

The book is covered with the dried entrails of little creatures. I am well acquainted with its aerodynamics.

Thunk.

It's not an experience I relish, but watching the cockroach belly-up on the floor, leg circuits firing, my primate brain cannot muster a sliver of sympathy. He is a bad omen, a spy from the abyss.

I deliver the final crunch. His belly spews brown liquid on to the Dalai Lama's smiling face.

I scoop him up and tip him out the window. This must be the insect equivalent of being buried at sea.

My colleague tells me it's bad practice to squash a cockroach. If the roach is female and carrying eggs, they'll spill out and hatch instantly - one million vengeful sons and daughters.

Far better to boil them. They can't come back from that.

I heard Buddhist monks shave their heads to avoid having to kill lice.

I do feel guilty about the bevy of critters that arrive in my bedroom for slaughter each summer. The truth is it's hard to get the bastards outside without at least maiming them.

I have my limits. Certain spiders I won't kill, for the spider's sake. I wouldn't touch a weta or praying mantis. I have no problem killing bugs that are irritating, such as mosquitoes, flies and the dreaded cockroaches.

Moths I don't worry about because they kill themselves. I often wonder about the bodies of moths I find on my windowsill. They're pulled apart by ants, which carry them into bottomless cracks. I feel bad killing ants, for some reason.

When I was a camp counsellor in Canada I told my 13-year-old campers that if they killed an animal or insect on purpose, they would have to eat it.

There was a bird's nest with three little hatchlings on the beam above our cabin's entrance. We had watched this live natural history lesson unfold throughout the course of the hot Canadian summer.

I woke early one morning to find one of the chicks had fallen out of the nest on to our balcony.

He was just a tiny pink thing, helpless.

I made a sling out of a pair of my undies that had been drying on the line and tried to lift him back into the nest.

But the chick fell out of the sling, past the balcony and on to the ground below. He was in a bad way.

Anxious to solve the problem before having to explain it to my merry campers, I found a large, thick slab of granite in the forest and stood over the chick.

Thunk.

I rained the rock down with such force that when I lifted it away, the chick was completely flattened and very, very dead. The relief had been instant.

As I spared a thought for this brief candle, this flat pink thing on the forest floor, I sensed I wasn't alone.

One of my campers had emerged from the cabin and was watching from the balcony.

He'd witnessed the whole execution.

Harrison Christian is a Hawke's Bay Today reporter.

*Bruce Bisset is taking a break and returns next week.