Do Ants Hate?

The early spring afternoon was warm and peaceful and gave Warren a terrible feeling of disquiet. The long string of rainy days had ended and the first sunny day of the season encouraged a communal march out of doors. Eager anticipation of activities available for the first time in months filled nearly everyone with joy at the thought of days to come. Children played outside, families walked, parks filled, ponds and lakes drew visitors, gardeners tended gardens, and parkas and wool hats were deposited deep into closets. However, the distant hum of lawn mowers sent a shiver of mild irritation down Warren and he burrowed in his home office in an attempt to ignore it all.

“This is terrible,” he said to himself. “What a terrible day to be a nice day.”

It was not his neighbor’s cheerful discipline or the beautiful day that bothered him. He lamented that people were getting work done or were otherwise carefree while he wallowed in a deep pit of writer’s block. Gone were the quiet winter days when he had every excuse to stay in from the cold and rain and peck away at his keyboard, unaware of time or day. Inspiration eluded him and time evaporated away. What would his editors say? 

As a columnist for both The Tribune and The Gazette who occasionally sold inspirational opinion pieces to magazines and was always working on his novels (with which he hoped to change the world), Warren had a lot of work to do. He liked to think of himself as a principled person with a poetic flair and was compelled to be disciplined and creative in all he set out to accomplish. He was the type who would come to a full stop at a stop sign and would often smile at passers-by at the store, but would never carry on a conversation longer than he had to: polite and distracted. This produced in him a slight reclusiveness and often put him on edge, and he wished others were as principled as he was. Since his columns for the local papers were home and gardens and nature columns, perhaps he should have been out enjoying the climate. After several hours of unproductivity, he decided to do so.

Warren escaped to his garden and rolled up his sweater sleeves. He noted a couple of orange and black butterflies in the hedge, several bumble bees buzzing near the cherry blossom tree, and a line of small black ants lining his walkway. He dug his hands in a small mound of dirt and savored the earthy smell, but soon he lost interest as guilt of neglecting his writing crept in. He began to pace about. He paced in his garden, into the kitchen, down into his office, and back out into the garden, deep in thought and aimless. Where could he find inspiration? He walked to the park and back, in and amongst the many people treading up and down the sidewalks, and still nothing aroused his creativity.

Upon reentering his kitchen from the warmth outside, Warren wiped his sweaty forehead and immediately tore off his sweater. Flinging open the window, he spotted his next door neighbor, Neil, who was looking under the hood of what seemed to be a riding mower and was tinkering with it. Neil’s unusually large yard came up close enough to Warren's kitchen window that he could hear Neil muttering to himself something about how he should have been working on the blasted thing during the winter months and that it would take all day to fix. Warren took solace in knowing that his neighbor was also struggling to get any work done.

“I like Neil,” he said, “but he talks to himself too much.”

Warren returned to his office to concentrate but started wandering again soon enough. He found himself in the garden and grunted in exasperation. The butterflies and bees had vacated but the marching ants remained. A dotted black line angled toward the house but he was too busy thinking to notice.

“Maybe these little soldiers are worth writing about,” he said to himself. “No, no, no; too small, not interesting, and I hate ants.” 

He searched the garden for more inspiration. He searched the cellar. He searched the basement. He searched the refrigerator and found smoked turkey slices and a couple slices of cheddar that inspired him to lunch. He wheeled around to grab the bread and spotted the open window and its new intruders.

“Ants!” he said to himself. “In my kitchen!”

He thought he hated ants but wasn’t really sure why. 

“There are just too many of them,” he said to himself. “I hate ants.”

He convinced himself that he needed to destroy these pests and, anyway, he needed a break from all the hard thinking he had been doing. Extermination could wait until after lunch, though, especially since the ants trailed down behind the cabinets and not up on the counter where his food was. He slapped down two slices of wheat bread.

“Oh no,” he said to himself. “They are on the counter, too?”

Indeed there were two small black ants - and only two - just across the sink from where his naked bread slices lay. He grunted his frustrated grunt and placed his thumb an inch or two directly above them to squish them, for they were together. But something unordinary arrested his attention, and he paused the execution.

“Hello, what’s this?” he said to himself. “I have never seen this before.”

And he hadn’t, for what he saw was two ants - and only two - wrestling. Or, it certainly looked like wrestling, though perhaps they were fighting. Round and round they went, over, under, grabbing, rolling, pushing, again and again. It was ferocious, albeit on a very small scale, and very quiet, or at least it was to Warren. He leaned in with his face close to the action. The oddity struck him and he was entranced. It was not naive thinking that ants were not warriors; that much he knew. He had encountered plenty of ants before because of their tendency to colonize backyards and sidewalks everywhere. But he had never seen ants fighting each other. In all the colonies he had seen before, the ants always worked together. By his recollection, their kind was renowned for teamwork and colony-first behaviors. So why were these ones fighting each other?

“Why are these guys fighting each other?” Warren said to himself. “What a silly squabble.”

He did not understand what he was witnessing and considered if there was any way to make sense of it. Why indeed would two brothers - for he figured they must be from the same colony and have the same queen mother - of the most collaborative animal (so he thought, an excellent assumption by one who was neither a biologist nor a zoologist) brawl?

Was it for love? As a lover of stories, he was well aware of the all-too-common love triangle, but that didn’t seem to fit his brawlers. He was fairly certain most ants, especially the ones working outside the nest, did not participate in the procreation process with the queen. Furthermore, in his mind, she was the mother, not the love interest. And do ants even love?

Well then, was it for power? He could think of nothing that had been fought over more in history. However, this also was a stretch. All the examples of power struggles he came up with were wrought by mankind, all the true ones anyway. Besides, what power could a wandering ant possibly have or think he has (if he thinks at all)? He isn’t even the queen!

If it is not for love or power, perhaps it is for honor. Perhaps the one had wronged the other. 

“But which one?” he said to himself. “The one on the left.”

He was immediately dissatisfied with his naming convention so he named the one on the left Agamemnon and the one on the right Achilles after one of his favorite battle stories, though he admittedly had never read the whole thing. (And despite not knowing which was which aside from remembering, he thought it right to distinguish them anyway.) Now Agamemnon was fighting Achilles over a matter of shame and honor. Whose honor had been afflicted? And over what? It couldn’t be love; he had already concluded that much. Did ants even have a sense of honor? He reasoned that honor was unique to his kind and would not be found in the non-human portion of the animal kingdom. This was turning out to be harder than he thought.

And the battle went on: the ants remained locked in each other’s grips and tiny tempers still flared. Kicking, grabbing, biting, rolling, yet neither gaining ground on the other. At last, Agamemnon appeared to have Achilles in an advantageous hold but Achilles drove forward and pushed him back. Agamemnon was now struggling, his legs flailing, seemingly helpless as he was slowly rolled onto his back. Then, with a strong push of his legs and a stretch and a twist in the thorax, Agamemnon reached forth and pinched off Achilles’ right antennae with fierce chomping mandibles. Achilles was unfazed.

“This is incredible!” Warren said to himself. “Just like that Muhammed Ali biting off some fellow’s ear!” (He did not have an amazing grasp of sports history but no one was there to correct him.)

They must do it for sport, he guessed. However, as the fight raged on, the viciousness and the increased use of mandibles made him doubt that this was any type of sport.

“Besides,” he said to himself, “there are no officials.”

Maybe all this animosity stemmed from pure hatred. Do ants become angry? Do ants hate? Perhaps it was all for kicks. Do ants have fun? He was certain that any ant he had ever seen was not having fun.

“Get ‘im, Achilles,” he said to the ants, choosing a side. A slight embarrassment pricked him. “Well, you gotta pick one,” he defended himself. “I’m going for the underdog.”

He watched the ongoing struggle uninterrupted, unaware of how long it persisted. Neither the time nor the world around him distracted him. He was consumed. His forgotten bread staled. And the ants fought on atop the laminated vinyl battlefield. His thumb hovered over the combatants and he was too captivated to move it. Never did either fighter lose strength or will.

Compassion eventually washed over Warren, his gaze still transfixed and his body still stooped. He now realized this was a battle to the death and he reflected on how heartless and sick he was to stand aside and enjoy it. 

“Do we humans not do this to ourselves?” he said to himself. “Do we not glory in battle for the cost of great suffering?”

How sad it was to see these friends, these brothers at war. 

“Ant versus ant, human versus human,” he said to himself. “We are no better than the humble ant.”

He spoke with regret. He spoke with humility. And now he understood. His heart strengthened with resolve; his mind fortified with determination. He could do better. He would do better. He would change. He would change lives.

“I finally know what to write about!” he said to himself. “The answer is in the -”

Warren never spoke his next words because at that instant, Neil’s high-powered riding mower started up right outside the kitchen window and disrupted the profound examination. Warren’s thumb crashed down immediately on his inspiring heroes, extinguishing their lives and ending their long battle with a bitter loss for each. All that remained of Achilles and Agamemnon were their tiny, lifeless, mangled bodies, their quarrel forever forgotten.

Warren stormed out of the door wiping his thumb on his pants and screamed at his neighbor. With rage boiling and fists clenched, Warren warned Neil that he was interrupting significant progress of a critical transformation in Warren’s life and that Warren could not work under these terrible conditions with such a rude and ignorant neighbor. Then he said a few more awful things to cut at Neil’s soul and attack him as a person. After saying what he thought needed to be said and his shocked neighbor promised to mow on a different day when Warren wouldn’t be working so hard, Warren stamped back inside, muttering to himself something about wanting to throw punches and referring to Neil with obscene names. 

“Not again,” Neil said to himself. “That guy spends too much time talking to himself.”

Warren returned to his kitchen.

“Now where was I?” he said to himself. “And how can I get rid of these horrible ants?”