The number of people on the internet who say they’re terrified of even a picture of a spider seriously disturbs me. Years I ago I would have thought only the most extreme, freakish cases of arachnophobic mania could be that severe, but almost any well-trafficked website that posts an image of a spider will get comments freaking out about how the merest glimpse of arachnid-shaped pixels on the screen gave them some sort of aneurysm.

It’s unhealthy enough for anybody to be terrified of such harmless, fragile little animals, but for so many people to be that arachnophobic makes me actually feel sick to think about. It’s obscenely unnatural and nobody else seems to think it’s a problem.

Within my lifetime alone, I can remember when snakes, bats and frogs were much more widely reviled and vilified in popular culture than they are now. In just a couple decades, their public images have shown a dramatic improvement - they’re all much more popular, more respected and more admired than I remember them being in only first grade. Revulsion of spiders, on the other hand, just seems to be increasingly embraced, excused and defended.

We could easily teach kids to fear spiders less, and it would work, but barely anybody seems to want to.