A Scenic World

This photo is #4 in a series related to my favorite books. “Ender’s Game,” if you’re not familiar with it, is about a child, a boy named Ender, who is phenomenally good at strategy - so much so that he’s recruited to train against an alien attacker known as the buggers. He practices both with hands-on “battles” and with computer simulations (a.k.a. video games). I won’t give away the ending, but Ender ends up a different boy. In a word, his world was crushed.

So my plan was to have a video game controller in the foreground and myself, fully decked out in astronaut gear (they trained in space) in the background, looking sad. In fact, this is what you see here. But while I was setting up this shot, I noticed something on my floor. I’d just swept the day before, but God knows I’m no good at cleaning, and this looked like a pretty big something to miss.

It was a huge bug. I’d seen one a few nights prior crawling around next to my porch light, but this one looked like it was almost dead. It crawled around slowly but didn’t attempt to take flight or hop or do whatever bugs of its sort do to evade predators.

I abhor killing bugs. I practice catch-and-release. But I was fairly certain this guy was already nearly dead. RJ, a friend of mine from work and an entymologist in the making, had just mentioned to me the previous day that the most humane way to kill a bug was with fingernail polish remover. Unfortunately he hadn’t gone into detail, but I placed a plastic container over the bug and put a paper towel soaked with the polish remover inside. He twitched a few times and was still.

Now, the moral dilemma. A bug, especially of this size and sort, would make a perfect prop for my “Ender’s Game” photo. I have never managed to get an insect macro shot, and suddenly one had presented itself on my living room floor. I moved the controller and placed the bug where it had been. I set up a maglite as illumination. And I snapped the shutter.

Then I saw him twitch again. Worried that he was still struggling, I put him back in the container with the nail polish remover-soaked towel. Again, he stopped moving.

My shots with the bug were okay, but it was bloody difficult to get him really big in the photo with me in the background - even with an aperture of f/32, I was just a blur. So I re-did the shot again. I’d nearly gotten it when he twitched AGAIN.

I was very worried that I was just torturing him with the nail polish remover vapors. So I did what seemed like the only humanitarian thing to do - I doused him with it. This time, he was instantly still. When I moved the container a bit, he fell over.

Thirty minutes later, as I gazed at his carcass, struggling with my photographic demons as to whether to post a photo with a dying animal or not, I saw him move one last time. Convinced that this bugger would prove to be just as difficult to kill as the buggers in Ender’s Game, I gave him one last chance at life.

He was summarily thrown into the front yard, and I posted the photo with the controller.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Moral Dilemma, 365. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.