I hear the aliens got one of these things that they put some alien crickets in. Called it “earth” I think. Left it in a dark corner and kind of forgot about it.
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Don’t stop at piloting plastic toy vehicles, I think that many of my life decisions might be improved if I turned them over to a committee of crickets.
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I read a similar anecdote from a movie where prodigious numbers of cockroaches had to be stomped underfoot (maybe the last segment of Creepshow?) The SPCA monitor wouldn’t allow the stomping of actual roaches, so they used quick editing and single-serve mustard packets instead. Ultimately this turned out best for everyone involved, since stomping on a mustard packet results in far more of a disgusting-looking goopsplosion than you’d ever get from a real roach.
Edit: According to Roger Ebert, that story was about Men In Black. Also, it seems Air Bud actually made those baskets himself!
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What if they just use crickets that are assholes? Like the Rush Limbaughs of the cricket world?
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Yeah, I look at this toy as a training tool for youngsters to root out crickets in the wild - get them good and ready for the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
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Only poor kid put bugs in those cars. The rich kids? They threw that guy from Men In Black in a smartcar
We? Do you have a cricket in your pcoket?
Y’know, from the cricket’s point of view, it wouldn’t be any weirder/worse than being brought home from the pet store in a tiny clear box with confusing lights and sounds and movement. The humans know that the crickets’ hopping confusion is being used to drive a toy, but from the crickets’ POV, it’s just another little box with weird stuff going on outside and intermittent motion.
From a Kantian perspective, using the cricket’s movements to drive a car unbeknownst to the cricket would be subverting the cricket’s free will. And that is really distasteful to us when it happens to people, but it’s a cricket and you’d have a lot of talking to do to defend the idea that crickets have free will, let alone free will that humans are morally obliged to consider.
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He’s basically arthropod-Voltron!
The Elf on the Shelf isn’t going to say anything about your right to consume and control
You can get crickets at a pet store? Really? I did not know this! I make the RatBoys go to a great deal of work to catch crickets when they want to go fishing.
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Usually I cringe at film censorship, it feels like vandalism. But the way I hear the ASPCA on this one is that the filming of animal deaths of whatever kind is what they want to avoid. If they need to spray for bugs in the course of the filming process, that can happen off screen. The stories I heard about the Lord of the Rings production reminded me that these things still matter.
Honestly, I was just ignorant on the topic, I guess. From elementary school, I learned that insects weren’t considered “animals,” and that’s stuck with me as a truth all these years. When I read the word “animal,” I immediately attacked it as being ridiculous, since we’re talking about crickets, but, between you and @ChuckV , I see that my elementary school teachers were wrong, and tainted my noggin.
But I agree, the life of a cricket seems a little beneath worry, hence the tongue-in-cheek mention of Jainism. Thanks for schooling me!
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In the actual book of Pinocchio the cricket character gets squashed by Pinocchio because he’s being annoying. Sadly, Disney being Disney removed that and let the insipid vermin live.
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share! or, citation?
oops, it was the hobbit
I loved that part. I’ve got a facsimile printing of one of the original Italian editions around here somewhere.
Yeah, I’m really not feeling it. Crickets are insects without a central nervous system. Admittedly, I “free” spiders from the house rather than killing them, because they are beneficial and are eating the other insects. Mosquitos and other parasites get squished.
The objection I see is more nuanced, which is not so much about any non-existent “suffering” of insects, but rather that training kids to use living beings as toys could instill a sense of callousness towards other animals, ones with actual brain stems, because it is a bit too complex to teach kids the nuances of bio ethics.
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I remember an uncle finding me as a little kid pulling the legs off a crane fly. He was very disappointed, and informed me that, while the bug probably can’t feel pain, I’m still ruining its life. Told me to think on that for awhile and I understood it. Being cruel says as much about the perpetrator as the victim, and even if the bug isn’t relatable, it’s important not to screw with animals. They have lives of their own.
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