Why don't people get in trouble with squishing a bug ?

It is cultural. Some cultures do respect bugs, others don’t care about killing animals.

Why do you get n trouble for killing a dog or cat, but not a deer, a steer, or a sheep?

There isn’t much taboo around killing animals that are very small, not particularly intelligent, and seen as pests. On the flip side, we’ll kill larger animals if we eat them (well, for many of us, only if someone else does the killing for us). It’s kind of all over the place.

There’s a great episode of South Park about Japanese whaling, where everyone is super outraged over the killing of whales, but at the end, they convince the Japanese to kill cows and chickens instead, and they come through the farm with weapons, slaughtering the cows and chickens brutally, blood everywhere, to which Randy remarks “now the Japanese are normal, like us”.

When I was around 15 years old my sister caught me killing a ladybug. I got out of school for a week since she didn’t want the school asking questions about “child abuse”. She beat the shit out of me.

I almost never hurt insects. If they are attacking me, they die. Otherwise, I try to go out of my way to be nice to them.

Just last night, I pulled a dragonfly out of an old spider web. It took me about 39 minutes, to gently pull all the old web off of her. I rinsed her off, and put her in a safe place. She was SO exhausted from flailing, that she just sat there. I checked on her every few hours. Eventually, she flew off. Hopefully she thrives, and makes more beautiful dragonflies.

Little things like that, really make me happy. I helped something that was suffering. I suppose it can’t be called altruism, because I feel better by helping them.

I’ve always thought, that people who just kill things, are living wrong.

Tell that to people that have been bitten by mosquito.

^Why? I just said that if it attacks me, I defend myself.

^ Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean to plagiarize your statement. I don’t always read the earlier posts.

^No worries.