Perfect timing: Just as Time Magazine comes out with a cover story about (non-human) animals’ intelligence,* I engage in combat, or at least a battle of wills, with a spider. And I don’t know who won.
Getting into the bathtub, I noticed a spider at the end near the shower, and thought, “I’ll save you from drowning, Spider.” Easier said than done. I lifted the spider from the bottom of the tub to the side corner, thinking s/he’d escape up the tile wall and away from the water.
Nope.
Instead, as I showered, s/he started back down the tub side toward the drain. A suicidal spider?
This time, I re-caught the spider and put him/her a distance away, on the side of the sink, again thinking s/he’d climb the wall. Wrong.
Instead, by the time I’d showered, the spider was climbing up the side of the sink, away from the drain, then sliding down toward it again, and trying the ascent somewhere else. Up and down a few more times before I was dressed enough to gently wrap this free-thinking adventurer in a tissue and head downstairs to the front door.
Once on the front porch, I shook the tissue out over the ivy bed, but – truthfully – didn’t see the spider heading down.
Maybe s/he had long since escaped my good intentions and found another place in the house, while I was in transit, to hole up – or to do more death-defying stunts.
* “Inside the Minds of Animals: Science is revealing just how smart other species can be – and raising new questions about how we treat them,” August 16, 2010
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