Growing up on a citrus farm with chickens to boot, the ratio of flies to human beings in my family’s general living area was quite high.

We hated bugs in general, with flies and mosquitos at the top of the list. It’s hard to say which is worse, but my mother especially despied flies. She nearly always had matamoscas  at  the ready, especially on those long and hot summer days.

When my Mom wasn’t using a fly swatter on the critters, she was whacking one across the back of my legs or those of my younger brothers when we crossed her. I wonder what my mother would have said way back when if I had said, “Hey Mom, don’t kill that mosca. Let me get a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher so we can save its life and we can release the mosca into the wild so it can live another 10 days before it dies.” 

The humane bug catcher is a contraception that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is sending over to the White House because President Obama murdered a fly during a television interview this week.

“We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals,” PETA spokesman Bruce Freidrich told Politico.

A fly is an animal? Nombre. I wouldn’t have wanted to tell my grandfather the gritty farmer that one. He didn’t much care for his grandchildren’s dogs that lived next door to him, much less the hordes of flies buzzing around his farm. He barely tolerated the chickens, but then he had to, given they produced something, (eggs), that my grandparents ate with everything from green beans to ground  beef to nopalitos, their personal favorite juevos combo.

Taking a wild guess here, but I suspect most Americans aren’t reaching for a bug humane catcher with flies buzzing around. Each fly carries about 5 million germs, including those that spread delightful diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dystentery, polio and pneumonia. Taking a fly swatter to the task over trapping flies in a bug humane catcher would surely be one of few bipartisan issues that Obama and the Republicans can agree upon.

 Organizations like PETA are out to save the world, so bless them, but I can’t go with the flies-are-animals things. On the very same day that the president of the United States executed a fly, I was at a local sandwich place when a fly came buzzing around, landing on a window next to me. Without thinking, I rolled up  the Life Section of my USA Today and swatted it dead.

Oh well, at least it was the soft news of entertainment that ended the 15-day life of the average fly and not the hard news of an uncaring world.  

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