I made a curious moral distinction yesterday while cleaning up dog poop.

While scooping the aforementioned poop, I somehow managed to also include with the turds both an ant and a beetle.

I knew that their inevitable home would be in a tied-shut bag filled with mountains of pooch poo, which would further end up in the trash, which would probably be all she wrote for these two buglets.

I went out of my way to rescue the beetle.

I left the ant in with the dooky.

You’d think, okay, it’s laziness. It wasn’t. The beetle took a lot of effort to get out of the poop with the scooper. I probably sat there futzing with the stupid bug for two minutes. (I fully expect to get a postcard in the mail from the beetle in which he expresses the uttermost of gratitude.)

No, what it was is that I made a very strange judgment call.

I thought, “Okay, the beetle is an independent dude. His destiny is his own. The ant is a hive creature, a child of the colony. I’ve already taken him away from the colony. As an individual, the ant simply doesn’t matter.”

Silly bugs. Silly me.

In related news, I just came from the park, where I saw a Mega-Hornet kill and eat part of a cicada. The Mega-Hornets are monstrosities. They’re as big as my thumb. That’s no exaggeration.

Oh, and just in case hornets don’t freak you out yet –