This post was partly inspired by, and shares some themes with, this Joe Carlsmith post. My post (unsurprisingly) expresses fewer concepts with less clarity and resonance, but is hopefully of some value regardless.

Content warning: description of animal death.

I live in a small, one-bedroom flat in central London. Sometime in the summer of 2023, I started noticing moths around my flat.

I didn’t pay much attention to it, since they seemed pretty harmless: they obviously weren’t food moths, since they were localised in my bedroom, and they didn’t seem to be chewing holes in any of my clothes — months went by and no holes appeared. ^[1] The larvae only seemed to be in my carpet.

Eventually, their numbers started increasing, so I decided to do something about it.

I Googled humane and nonlethal ways to deal with moth infestations, but found nothing. There were lots of sources of nontoxic methods of dealing with moths — like putting out pheromone-laced glue traps, or baking them alive by heating up the air — but nothing that avoided killing them in the first place.

Most moth repellents also contained insecticide. I found one repellent which claimed to be non-lethal, and then set about on a mission:

1. One by one, I captured the adult moths in a large tupperware box, and transported them outside my flat.
   1. This was pretty hard to do, because they were both highly mobile and highly fragile.
   2. They were also really adept at finding tiny cracks to crawl into and hide from me.
   3. I tried to avoid killing or harming them during capture, but it was hard, and I probably killed 5% or so of them in the process.
2. Then, I found the area where I thought they were mostly laying their eggs, and sprayed the nonlethal moth repellent that I found.

I knew that if this method was successful, it’d be highly laborious and take a long time. But I figured that so long as I caught every adult I saw, their population would steadily decline, until eventually they fell below the minimum viable population.

Also, some part of me knew that the moths were very unlikely to survive outside my flat, having adapted for indoor living and being not very weather resistant — but I mentally shrank away from this fact. As long as I wasn’t killing them, I was good, right?

After some time, it became clear this method wasn’t working.

Also, I was at my wit’s end with the amount of time I was spending transporting moths. It was just too much.

So, I decided to look into methods of killing them.

I was looking for methods that:

• Were very effective in one application.
  • After all, if I could kill them all at once, then I could avoid more laying eggs/hatching in the meantime, and minimise total deaths.
• Had a known mechanism of action, that was relatively quick & less suffering-intense.

I called a number of pest control organisations. No, they said, they didn’t know what kind of insecticide they used — it’s…insecticide that kills moths (but it’s nontoxic to humans, we promise!).

So, I gave up on the idea of a known mechanism of action, and merely looked for efficacy.

The pest control professionals I booked told me that, in order for their efficacy-guarantee to be valid, I needed to wash every item of clothing and soft furnishings that I owned, at 60℃.

For a small person with a small washing machine, a lot of soft furnishings, and no car to take them to a laundrette… this was a really daunting task.

And so — regrettably — I procrastinated.

September became December, and then the moth population significantly decreased on its own. I was delighted — I thought that if the trend continued, I’d be spared the stress and moral compromise of killing them.

But December became February, and the moths were back, in higher numbers than ever before.

It was hard to walk around on one side of my bedroom without being in danger of crushing them.

I developed new routines to avoid moth deaths:

• One time, I saw a moth drown in a cup of water I left out overnight. After that, I didn’t leave water out unattended again.
• I would cool down my electric hob with water after cooking, to avoid moths landing on it and burning to death.
• I would shake my towel outside the bathroom before using it, because I knew moths liked to hide in it.^[2]

Eventually, my boyfriend and I decided we couldn’t carry on like this.

I wasn’t sure what would happen if we kept doing nothing — would they eat the whole carpet and exhaust their food source? At the rate they were going, with minimal visible damage, that could take years — but we felt that we had to do something.

So — after finding a pest control company that didn’t require me to wash everything I owned, and saying a small, feeble apology to the moths on the last night of their lives, which of course they didn’t understand —

I paid a man to come to my flat and kill all of the moths. I smiled and chatted to him, and offered him coffee, while he got set up.

I had to be out of the flat while the spraying actually happened.

But when I came back… the sight made me feel viscerally sick. Dead and dying adult moths littered the floor, and walls, and surfaces.

One by one, I tried to find and euthanise the dying. I had to really work myself up to be able to do it the first time, but after a few crushed moths (the sickening ‘pop’ of their heads — or thoraxes? — is still vivid in my mind) it got easier to do.

The hardest ones to kill were those that didn’t seem sick from the insecticide, and were still running or flying, but I reasoned that killing the whole flat’s population would minimise total deaths.

…And that being killed by crushing was almost certainly better than an eventual slow death from whatever insecticide had been used.

I’d naively hoped that they’d mostly have quick deaths, despite not knowing what chemical was even used, or how it was supposed to work.

And, to be fair, it’s hard for me to observe the larvae who live in the carpet — and these are most of the population. I don’t know how quickly the larvae died, if they even are dead. I hope they died quickly.

But the adults… I think about 5-10% of the adults that I found were still alive, 5ish hours after the treatment.

And some smaller percentage (1-2%?) were still alive more than 24hrs after. All of these that I found were writhing in agony, lying on their backs with their abdomens curling arhythmically back and forth. I think what I did by paying for their deaths is as close to purposefully inflicting torture as I can reasonably imagine myself ever doing.

Today, it is nearly 3 days after the treatment, and (mercifully) I haven’t found any living adults for some time.

Why am I writing this — why did I waste your and my time with a story of such a mundane moral atrocity?

In small part, this is a public service announcement.

I think my procrastination led to many many more deaths than there would have been otherwise. If I’d have dealt with the infestation in the summer, who knows how many fewer moths there would have been to kill.

Next time I notice an infestation of any animal in my home, I will act much faster.

In small part, this is a story, for your consideration.

I think this forum is a place to share parts of our lives that result from taking our moral beliefs seriously.

It would be easy for me to feel okay about killing the moths by looking away from their suffering, or by taking solace in the lack of certainty about their sentience.^[3]

I’m sort of glad I don’t do that.

But mostly, I think I wrote this because part of me naively hopes that by “confessing” the deliberate, knowing part I had in killing (torturing?) dozens or hundreds of animals, I will somehow be absolved.

…That’s not how this works, by the way. There is no absolution.

I killed the moths.

1. ^{^}

   I think this is because moths only eat “natural” fibres. I don’t own any clothes made of animal fibres, because I’m vegan and have been for ~10 years. I’ve read that moths can sometimes eat cotton, but for whatever reason, these moths definitely didn’t eat my clothes!

2. ^{^}

   You might worry about the hygiene implications of this. Actually, adult carpet moths don’t eat, and IIUC they also don’t excrete. I also couldn’t find any evidence of them being disease vectors. And, as I mentioned, they seemed to only lay eggs in my carpet. So I accepted their little fuzzy presences even on my towel :)

3. ^{^}

   Lepidoptera seem very likely to be sentient in my opinion.