Amanda Hocking

I don’t know about you, but this summer, earwigs have been hitting my small town pretty hard. At work, at home, everywhere I go, I seem to find an earwig.

If you’re unfamiliar with an earwig, here’s what the dastardly little fellas look like:

I’d actually never seen one before this year (to the best of my memory) so I had to look stuff up on them. I assumed that like the evil monsterous centipedes that make me scream in terror, these were mean and vicious and poisonous and most certainly wanted me dead.

Instead, I found out they’re one of the friendliest insects. They’re completely harmless to humans, and they eat other annoying insects and vegetation. Those nasty pinchers on their butts are used for carrying food, and they don’t bite or pinch you with them.

But the thing that got me – they’re one of the only insects with maternal insticts. They actually care for their young, which is more than you can see for many species in the animal kingdom, including my beloved sea turtle.

This fact has drilled itself in my brain. It’s like when Juno when to the hospital to procure her hasty abortion, and then all she could think about was the baby’s fingernails, so she couldn’t go through with it.

I have a no-kill policy, in that I don’t kill insects. (Mosquitoes, fleas, and lice are discluded. I don’t want to kill them but I have no other way to get rid of them. And I really, really, really hate mosquitoes.) I’ll rescue spiders and tolerate ants and run from centipedes.

So I wasn’t going to kill earwigs anyway. But now I’ve actually become rather fond of them, despite the fact that they’re infesting my life. I think they’re about as adorable as a creepy little bug can be. And yes, I would scream and freak out if one touched me. But I like them.

The problem is my roommate keeps killing them. He also tries to kill moths, which really, really makes me angry, because that’s essentially butterfly murder. Butterfly murder is NEVER okay. NEVER.

But it’s making me very sad. I like the earwigs. I would enjoy it if they moved out of my house, and I encourage them to do so every chance I can, because my dog also eats them. And sometimes they fall from the ceiling and land on my cat when we’re watching TV, and I don’t like that, although she doesn’t seem to care. But my cat is really tough. The toughest ever.

Anyway… I don’t know what to do about the earwigs. Or how to make my roommate stop murdering them.

They take care of their babies. That just gets to me. I don’t know why. But there it is.

So the problem with earwigs is that I have no idea what to do with them.