who are you calling dirty?
This morning while studying tsume go problems and drinking coffee at the Lighthouse, a common housefly landed on the top of the page. I switched my attention to the fly. This fly was cleaning him/herself (my eyes aren’t good enough to determine if it was male or female) by rubbing its legs together. Very methodically it cleaned it’s front legs, then its rear legs, then back to the front, then the rear again, rubbing them against its wings too — hard to tell if it was cleaning its rear legs against its wings, or cleaning its wings by rubbing them against its legs. And it continued cleaning for ten minutes. This fly was fastidious about cleanliness — either its legs had something very sticky or hard to remove on them, or else it had a fetish. Regardless, I am wondering if reports of flies’ dirtiness are exaggerated, perhaps by pesticide companies. Admittedly flies’ habit of landing on feces is dirty. But they may have their own species-specific standard of cleanliness. The germs that make people sick may not affect flies, and vice versa. Flies may spend a hefty portion of their time cleaning themselves, ignorant of their reputation among humans as dirty.