The equivalent of spider fighting in America is dog fighting. But, there are some major differences. Spider fighting is not illegal and the people involved could die if the spider is poisonous.
Every time Leah and I have caught our fellow church members, just the older men, playing with their spiders and making them fight, we cringe. They use a tiny stick to set the spiders on and let them go at it. It’s very tricky for the person holding the stick, they have to keep readjusting their hand positions because the spiders run back and forth on the stick. Sometimes the spiders are poisonous, and when they are, the person is in a lot of danger!
Even though I don’t like this fascination they have with this sport, I agreed to go with them the other night to catch their spiders. They drove until they came to a highway with lots of trees and meadows on either side. Then they got out and searched with little flashlights for spiders in their webs.
I didn’t realize how many spiders lived in the woods! They form their webs at night, and some of these giant webs held some pretty massive spiders. I hope I don’t ever have to walk in the woods at night…
Once they spot the spider, they get close to the web and then snatch the spider with their bare hands! Yikes!! Then, to keep the spider from moving around too much, they blow on it, which makes it curl up into a ball. Then they place it in little compartments that they create out of simple medicine boxes like Benadryl.
It was a funny scene: a large group of people parked along a highway road, running their flashlights through trees. Some people pulled over and asked us what we were doing. It did look fishy… In America, a cop would have probably thought we were drunk! Or doing drugs or hiding a dead body…. But no, we were simply looking for spiders.
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