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Many people talk about “putting butterflies ‘out of their misery’ or say “I couldn’t kill it”. The other option is: to leave it to Nature.
Death is a part of life, a part of Nature. It’s absolutely natural to die. A farmer friend once told me “when you have livestock, you’ll get dead stock”. Isn’t that true?
Take the monarch butterfly as an example: A female monarch will lay 300 or 500 or even possibly a thousand eggs. If every one of those became an adult then the monarch would be described as a pest. We only need one or two for the species to be continued, three or four to boost the population.
Some of them are destined to become food for predators, and parasites, and diseases… Some may even feed the soil!
As responsible, caring kaitiaki we can do more for the monarch butterfly by removing diseased specimens and disposing of them with compassion. Some of the merits and possible methods are explained here in “Killing Insects for Conservation”, and “Do Insects Feel Pain?”, a blog by the BBC.
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