Do you crush bugs?

Summary of responses: Fuck mosquitoes.

I used to disagree, everything has a vital place in the ecosystem. But over time the mosquitoes have campaigned persistently to change my mind. We can have a nice wake when they're all in hell.

No, I just panic generally until someone else takes care of it.

The only insects I have real problems with are flyers who get stuck indoors or ants. Flyers get shooed away, but ants get poisoned. I can generally deal with individual bugs, but entire colonies is when I go genocidal. I keep food sealed so they get attracted to any form of standing water.

Most things in my house get crushed. Moths I might let outside, they're helpful pollinators. Earwigs, boxelder bugs, ants, etc, all of them are not welcome, and I will spray inside to keep them out. I try to avoid spraying chemicals around outside of I can, I want to keep all the pollinators healthy so they can enjoy our butterfly bushes.

Bees are friends, wasps can get fucked though.

Spiders are always good housemates that eat other things, unless they land directly on me, then they're dead.

In terms of indoor pests, spiders get a pass. Centipedes get brutally crushed.

There are some bugs that I'll crush even outdoors. Japanese beetles get their heads snapped off if I find them on my plum trees. Squash vine borer moths get appropriately squashed, those little fuckers.

Generally, no. In fact, for a while I had a roach living with me (in my bathroom). It surprised me and I'm sure I let out a defensive "whoa!" when I first saw it in my sink, but I let it be. I'd see it every so often when I went in to use the restroom/shower/brush teeth/etc. and it kinda became a welcome familiar face, as weird as that sounds. I wondered how the hell it was sustaining itself and also how long a roaches lifespan lasts. Well, I got an answer to that last question a couple of months later when I spotted a sickly looking roach on the floor near my bed, on its back, legs withering in death throes. I had never seen it outside of my bathroom, so I'll romanticize that moment as the roach, having become fond of me, deciding to die by my side.

I'll squash a bug that bites me, though.

Mosquitos and fruit flies get the zapper, spiders are left in place(big ones too, spiders are awesome!). If spiders do get in annoying spots l just pick em up with a glass and either set them down outside or in some dark corner of the house depending on mood. There's not really any toxic spiders here.

l often find tiny spiders in my hair (got a lot of curls, they just end up in there when l go outside) that dangle down in front of my eyes, mission impossible-style.
l usually just intercept their 'lil zipline and set them down elsewhere.

Also, vermin-type bugs like those tiny centipedes that eat paper end up on the wrong side of my can of biological bug killer.

Oh, and moths are annoying to catch/deal with so l just let those flap around usually. Maybe open a door & turn on the hallway lamp to get them to move elsewhere. l kinda like moths anyway, they're cute. Same for jumping spiders; adorable.

I do my best to avoid it if possible.

They are living creatures and I do my best not to be jury, judge, and executioner for a being that is likely not causing me any harm. I have gone out of my way to capture and release an assortment of bugs that have tried to take residence in both my home and workplace, leaving the bug's fate up to nature. This stance is a bit at odds though with my significant other who can't stand bugs, notably ants and spiders. This causes me to sometimes have to play the role executioner if there is no other alternative.

Its just the idea to me that the creature is living and breathing, and I decide to end that so nonchalantly, does not sit well with me. I probably listen to too many Buddhist dharma talks that reinforce this belief and instill a sense of karma when it comes to these actions. I like to think that by showing compassion to even the most insignificant creatures, that the sentiment will be returned to me in some way or another down the line.

It depends on the bug. German cockroaches? Dead. American cockroaches? They go outside because they're a mess to clean up, and aren't generally going to infest a home. Moths, junebugs and craneflies? If it isn't a pantry moth, I release it. Problem is, there's a bush right outside my door the damn things like. I usually only kill things that are known infesting pests.

I kill wayward spiders, typically because I only seem to find them late at night when I get up to go pee, and I'm not chasing a spider around before I go back to sleep.

Unless they're becoming too common inside the house, I generally just don't mess with them. But every year we go through cycles of flies, lady bugs, and stinkbugs everywhere in the house. At that point I become Bug Rambo. We also started to see an influx of tiny little fireflies for some reason the past few weeks. Hesitant to give them the Rambo treatment, because fireflies are cool.

But then there's roaches. Man I do not deal with roaches...little disease factory MFers that live in your walls and crawl on you while you're sleeping. My wife and I's first apartment was infested with German roaches and it set off some bizarre constant state of anxiety in me. We moved as quickly as we could because neither of us could handle how gross that was. 5 years later I still have nightmares where I find a roach in our current house and get panicky.

Lots of them:

• Invasive species: Kill on sight, and take every non-poison method to stop their spread. Even poison in highly-concentrated spots. (Looking at you Lanternflies!)
• Any wasp/hornet looking to make a nest near my home.
• Fleas, ticks, mosquitos.
• Basically anything inside the home, although crickets might get moved outside if they're not too persistent. Don't typically spray, just glue traps. Unless they're termites, then purge.

The rule of thumb is to not use poison unless it's the only way to address the problem. Poisons and pesticides are very much linked to ecosystem destruction, and should be avoided when possible. Hornet nests near the home are best addressed by smoking them out, not spraying with pesticide.

I've also come to the conclusion that the author of the article you linked is a nutjob, approximately as much as an anti-vaxxer. On this page he advocates against preserving nature. The logic is that because nature is cruel, having less of it is good. Here's some other gems from his site:

• Earning to give: Rather than working at an altruistic charity yourself, it can be more effective to make money elsewhere and donate large portions of it to charity.
  • This is a 'pass the buck' stance. If everybody did that, we'd all be patting ourselves on the back while nothing actually change. We see this now with 'social media activism.' It is useful, but only as a complement to activism, not in place of it. His first recommendation for charities to donate to is the one he runs. Hmmmm.
• Don't compost. Instead: avoid wasting food, dispose of food scraps in a sink grinder, or seal food in plastic bags and then put it in the garbage.
  • Yes, food waste is bad. But there's inedible brown/green plant matter, and even small waste of edible (peeled potatoes for example). Compost is how you get nutrients back into the ground after growing crops. Sealing compostable food waste in plastic is bonkers.
• Reducing your water use may avoid killing tens to hundreds of thousands of crustacean zooplankton per year.
  • There's plenty of reasons to reduce water use. Killing zooplankton in the course of using it is not one of them.
• A naive analysis that focuses only on the immediate harm caused by humans would conclude that rainforest destruction is net bad for animals. Most veg*ans stop there and don't look further to realize that rainforest loss also plausibly prevents substantial animal suffering that would have occurred due to natural causes.

It's no surprise that he's a "skeptic." The skeptic movement is a weird one, and I think this blog post sums up why.

Kill the bloody mosquitoes. I don't care about the rest. Spiders are cool, there web traps bugs. They should be treasured.

It depends. Mosquitoes get killed on sight, as do moths of the sorts destructive to clothes. Everything else gets ushered back outside or left to live their own lives.

I usually vacuum them up with the vacuum hose attachment to avoid wall splatters. I once had the most enormous house centipede I've ever seen that was so large it got stuck in the end of the hose nozzle for a maybe 10 seconds (panic) until it finally got sucked away.

I use one of these: https://www.amazon.com/BugZooka/dp/B004OHAK5K. Honestly, it's one of my favorite purchases. It makes dealing with most bugs, other than really small or really big ones, as simple as a point and a click. I can't imagine going back to the barbaric days of bug crushing.

Anything that intentionally bites or will infest my home gets killed, otherwise I generally try to move them gently outdoors. The exception is house centipedes and the various harmless spiders in my area, with which I'll happily cohabitate.

Occasionally a harmless brown spider gets confused for a recluse, or a fruit fly gets mistaken for a midge, but I do my best to look before I swat. That isn't to say I don't feel guilty to kill any of these little fellas, and I won't pretend to be justified in it.

Generally no, unless I see a mosquito. Then it's war!

I do if they’re pests. There are lots of o pests in tropical countries.

In the answers here I notice a consensus when the subject is mosquitos. Therefore I save my answer about them for the last sentence. Most things in my house will survive - either leaving them be or escorting them outside. I expand this even more into my workplace, where people usually swat and stomp any critters. When I find a little fella in a public spot like a bathroom I often carry them outside. 'Even more' in this case is because I know others would crush it. Living in Switzerland, mosquitos aren't this big of a deal. Biting midges and mosquitos are thus about the same danger level. Meaning they also only die if it's impossible to save them or leave them be.

Only two kinds: mosquitoes and spotted lantern flies. The latter are an invasive species we have been dealing with on the east coast of the US for a few years now. They are everywhere and destroy trees and have little-to-no natural predators at the moment.

Otherwise stuff like crickets, spiders, ants or whatever are fine crawling around the house unless I start to see too many.