Most people who will let one ant or spider go will not feel such affinity with 300,000 ants. Then, it's kill kill kill.
Many of us think the same way, subconsciously, about people. It's wrong to kill or hurt others, but it isn't so bad to bomb them en masse.
Of course, this is wrong; 300,000 people are just as valuable as one person. And if bugs are sacred like people, it's as wrong to euthanize a million of them as it is to torture one with a magnifying glass.
What bothers me, is that many of us don't even show the same love for people as you're showing for bugs (with things such as perpetual war and abortion). But it may actually be that by respecting bugs we'll come to respect each other.
Some people will justify killing bugs and animals by saying they kill each other. But that doesn't matter because we aspire to be better than animals; we want to show compassion where they do not. But if we put animals at human level, then they are us and we're back to square one. It's the chicken and the egg problem.
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