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Firstly, I'm the kind of guy who steps on bugs, not around them. If there's a bug in my house; I don't "rescue it." I squash it, then flush it. So, that's my very non-objective starting off point on the subject, and I just want to be upfront about that.
With that said, on to the meat and potatoes:
Over the course of time I have noticed a small number of people who immediately dislike it when I step on bugs, with varying degrees of distaste. Some examples: I'm at a restaurant and a creepy looking spider is crawling on the floor near my seat, so I quietly slide my foot over and crunch it. Then someone at the table goes: "that was mean" Or, a bee lands on my glass so I sneak my hand up from the side to give it a flick (which I'm pretty good at btw) and then hear "it was just hungry" right after I've stomped it. Or if I'm playing tennis with a buddy and I stop to bulldoze an ant mound with the toe of my sneaker, he'll half-jokingly go "Come on... what did they do to you?" missing the obvious point that I'm purposely doing it for no reason.
This sort of reaction is more the exception than the rule. Most girls love when I step on a spider for them. Even when I go to step on ants, the most common reaction is indifference.
Meanwhile: catching fish and releasing them is arguably more brutal but rarely condemned.
Fish which are caught then released die all the time, bleeding to death, intended or not. Releasing doesn't mean "not lethal." And everyone who does catch and release fishing is aware of that outcome. That means its done for entertainment, doesn't it? Even worse that it is ritualized. And these are vertebrate organisms with a significantly more developed central nervous system which experiences pain. But people do this to "pass the time." To them this activity is a "hobby."
When I go to stamp my feet on a line of ants during an outdoor lunch, there's a chance I'll get a look from someone... but probably not if I were fishing. However, Attack of the Sharp Flesh-Tearing Hook seems more unpleasant than the Attack of the Giant Sneaker. Obviously I'm not a bug or a fish but given the choice, getting one's face punctured by a hook and dragged 20 yards until its torn out and you can't breathe seems way crueler than being crushed instantly under a gargantuan white rubber thing. The smell of my feet would be more traumatic, honestly.
I've never once seen that reaction toward killing pests/bugs so I can't really identify.
I could imagine it might seem weird to see a grown adult go out of his way to spastically kills some bugs but I don't really get the impression that's what you're doing?
Spastic killing of anything, including bugs, would have me giving an odd look too. But yea, I'm talking about just routine elimination of unwanted or annoying bugs -- stepping on ants on the back patio, for example. A number of people think it's cruel apparently. But at the same time they will take planned fishing trips "for fun" without any intention of using fish for meat.
and/or filet it up, smoke it up, give it away to friends and family: no moral dilemma.
Do you judge a hungry brown bear for eating a salmon?
Do you judge a cat for killing a mouse but never eating it?
Meanwhile, I'll catch a cricket which sneaks in my house and put it back outside. But anything else which in theory could bite me - terminate its life with a blot-crush-pinch of toilet paper. Anything like a cokk-a-roach, I will burn and chemically sanitize the ground it dared to walk on.
Bugs Outside, I dont give a whit. Live and let live. I dont go out of my way to harm them. The lizards which live on my patio, or the spiders in the shadows, or the birds that built a nest in my streetlamp will get them.
Ants however are a special case. I will feed them sweet smelling orange borax oil, till they drink their fill, and come back with more friends, and then bring some back to the Queen. No mercy, because in Augusts of Summers Past when they ran out of water, they dared to raid my home.
The double standards, hypocrisy and inconsistency on treatment of animals is indeed pretty mindboggling.
You could just have easily asked: why do some people get really upset if you have a pet dog that you occasionally neglect to take for a daily walk, but which is otherwise well cared for and loved, while at the same time chowing down on factory farmed beef and pork? Or, why do some people condemn the sustainable hunting of some types of whales in small numbers while having no problem whatsoever with billions of baby chickens being pulverised alive?
I would say that a lot of people have kind of weirdly half put animals into the sphere of moral concern and also kind of half-anthropomorphized animals, but not fully done so, which ends up with these weird cases of moral inconsistency in regards to treatment of animals.
I am pretty sure I am guilty of this all the time also. In the example you've given my guess would be though that anyone who genuinely condemns stepping on bugs is unlikely to be the same person as someone who will go sports fishing, but I could be wrong. To be honest, even though I am not a big fan of sport fishing, if one of my friends told me he was going sport fishing this weekend, I probably wouldn't call him out on it. If the same friend went out of his way to squash a spider that was doing no harm, I might say 'Hey why'd you do that?' I guess the reason is that if I called him out on fishing, it would seem like I was genuinely calling him cruel or immoral, whereas in the case of stepping on a bug, it would come across half-jokingly.
and/or filet it up, smoke it up, give it away to friends and family: no moral dilemma.
Do you judge a hungry brown bear for eating a salmon?
Do you judge a cat for killing a mouse but never eating it?
There are A LOT of people who go fishing for no other reason than to catch these animals and throw them back rather than to obtain a meat source for themselves or any of their friends, though. They literally do it because they are bored. False parallels with wild animals or cats don't bear addressing for reasons that are obvious.
Quote:
Bugs Outside, I dont give a whit. Live and let live. I dont go out of my way to harm them.
Do you (or does anyone you know) go out of the way to fish recreationally without intending to utilize the animal as a food source?
I think most people make a joke when they say things like that. Nobody really likes bugs around them. However there are pest insects and useful insects.
Pretty much nobody will bat an eye when you kill a cockroach, mosquito, fly etc. but most people would rather encourage honey bee, ladybug and other useful insects to leave, rather than kill them.
Maybe. Then again I have experienced people who will scold or frown on bug squashing. For example, I have a good friend who comes over to my house on a lot of afternoons. If we're on my back patio and I start stepping on a line of hungry ants making their way from the grass, he'll tell me to "just leave them alone." Sometimes I horse around and start stamping them even faster and he will say "Come on, man" or "I'm just going to leave then," ...although all he ever does is walk inside my house waiting for me. Also when I was still in college I had a teacher who told me to "grow up" after he saw me purposely drag my foot over a gummy bear under my desk that was literally covered in ants.
So yeah. There are definitely who don't like it or appear to get annoyed.
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Bleech ! 
