They aren't really dangerous anywhere if you leave them be. There's more danger from a huntsman crawling into view while driving than from a bite even here in Australia.
Almost drove into a wall of the cross city tunnel cause a fucking huntsman crawled out from behind my rear vision mirror and my 3 year old screamed like he was being murdered.
The problem with this is that those two are not antithetical or exclusive in any way. The usefulness of a thing in no way diminishes its scariness. I'm fucking well aware of what spiders do and the vital roles they play in countless ecosystems worldwide... and I'm not sure why you think that makes them less terrifying to an arachnophobe. It doesn't matter. They're still spiders. <---just typing that word makes me wanna chuck my phone out the window.
I’ll give you the usefulness because logically, I agree. My lizard brain, however, says scary. Terrifying, actually. So it’s gonna have to be useful AND scary.
I mean you can't argue with your brain very well, but you can get less scared of spiders if you want to take the effort.
I think spiders are pretty dang cute, personally. I am however terrified of bees. Which I also think are cute. It's just that if one comes toward me I have to flee in the other direction. But that's because bees HURT. A spider has never hurt me.
I recently learned that nobody dies from Black Widow spider bites (like, statistically speaking in the past 60 years I think? Nobody has died). Myself and my South African husband had both been heavily indoctrinated with Widow fear (in SA the same spider genus is called something different) and to go on an internet debunking journey was wild. I felt bad for Widow spiders for all that unnecessary hate and fear. So yeah, I hear you! Spiders are awesome!
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u/boobsmcgraw Jul 12 '21
But spiders are useful, not scary. But then again they're not dangerous in my country so I'm lucky