Yesterday I was unpacking a 4" OBT that got out and rampaged across my room. Usually this isn't a big deal, but then my heart jumped into my throat. Next to the cage was an open air vent. I closed the vents and started looking for the tarantula and it was nowhere.
I wouldn't have called anyone, except that I live in a dorm. There are other people here, and the house fellows (teachers who live inside the dorm) have two year old children. If it had gotten into the vents, I potentially put them at risk. I know, I know, it probably would just stay in the same place, but still, I felt responsible and that if anything DID happen, it would be my fault.
So I called campus security thinking that they would send over a securityguard with a can of raid, but apparently they called the dean of the college, the president of the college, the department of environmental safety, it goes on and on. They evacuated the ENTIRE dorm of three hundred people for one little spider.
After that, they began closing off each ventilation system in the building, sat for seven hours(!) waiting for the exterminator to show up and completely trashed my room looking for the spider, when they found it in one of my drawers they took one of MY textbooks, bent it so that I couldn't resell it and squashed the poor little guy. The exterminator took the corpse back to his house to preserve in ethyl alcohol. After that they told me that my other spiders were not allowed in the dorm, and would either have to be left outside (in the cold weather, essentially euthanization) or taken to the biology building and locked up.
The entire rationale for this was that "someone might be allergic!" I tried telling people that tarantula venom does not cause an allergic reaction, but no one would listen. I'm starting to look for academic papers that are able to show that tarantula venom does not pose a mortal threat or even physical threat to people. I'm also trying to see if, assuming they won't let me have them back, they'd let me keep and maintain the tarantulas in the biology building. Anyone else have similar disasters with Ts?
I wouldn't have called anyone, except that I live in a dorm. There are other people here, and the house fellows (teachers who live inside the dorm) have two year old children. If it had gotten into the vents, I potentially put them at risk. I know, I know, it probably would just stay in the same place, but still, I felt responsible and that if anything DID happen, it would be my fault.
So I called campus security thinking that they would send over a securityguard with a can of raid, but apparently they called the dean of the college, the president of the college, the department of environmental safety, it goes on and on. They evacuated the ENTIRE dorm of three hundred people for one little spider.
After that, they began closing off each ventilation system in the building, sat for seven hours(!) waiting for the exterminator to show up and completely trashed my room looking for the spider, when they found it in one of my drawers they took one of MY textbooks, bent it so that I couldn't resell it and squashed the poor little guy. The exterminator took the corpse back to his house to preserve in ethyl alcohol. After that they told me that my other spiders were not allowed in the dorm, and would either have to be left outside (in the cold weather, essentially euthanization) or taken to the biology building and locked up.
The entire rationale for this was that "someone might be allergic!" I tried telling people that tarantula venom does not cause an allergic reaction, but no one would listen. I'm starting to look for academic papers that are able to show that tarantula venom does not pose a mortal threat or even physical threat to people. I'm also trying to see if, assuming they won't let me have them back, they'd let me keep and maintain the tarantulas in the biology building. Anyone else have similar disasters with Ts?
