The lives of bugs and trees as well as cats and dogs

People don't like bugs. They like to read about bugs though. It's not that we're all a bunch of budding entomologists. Most of us, I suspect, are much more interested in knowing how to get rid of bugs than in the bugs themselves.

That's where newspapers come in.

Oh, sure, if we found something really interesting about the life cycle of aphids or if some scientific journal issued a new report that well-read people would want to know about, we would publish an appropriate story. But our more common concern, as two bug stories from this week show, is to provide information that has a practical application.

It may be interesting to you to know, for example, that the life cycle of an emerald ash borer begins with its larvae in the sap of a tree and continues through "pupation" in spring and adult emergence in early summer, when females lay eggs and resume the cycle. But you no doubt consider it far more valuable to know - as staff writer Harry Hitzeman wrote on Monday, aided by an informational graphic by presentation editor Tim Broderick - that insecticide can be injected into the soil around a tree that kills the borer's larvae and can save your tree.

Similarly, you already know that mosquitoes are making life in suburban backyards and parks miserable these days and you know doubt appreciated commiserating with staff writer Marni Pyke about the infestation on Tuesday, but it was surely also useful to know that the particular pests biting you now are likely not the kind that transmit the West Nile virus. Moreover, I bet you were encouraged to know that the August pestilence may soon be abating.

After the two stories ran in succession, Broderick jokingly suggested we should declare it "Bug Week," a la one of those special miniseries promoted by cable television channels. Maybe we should one day. But if we do, you can be sure we'll not only tell you information about the bugs we profile; we'll also tell you what you really want to know - how to get rid of them or at least how to deal with them.

As long as we're on the Animal Kingdom, a story we've followed since January culminated Tuesday in the sentencing of a man for shooting and killing a dog that had wandered into his yard after it escaped a nearby shelter. Elvin Dooley of the Grayslake area got 20 months in prison, a sentence that, in conjunction with a family story, emphasizes to me how differently society's values change over time.

The family story is told by my mother who recalls an instance from her southern Illinois childhood in the early 1940s when a drunken man came upon her and some friends playing with a kitten and purely out of meanness picked up the kitten and smashed it against a tree, killing it in front of the horrified girls. But horrified though they were, their experience never became more than a bitter memory. The man wasn't arrested. His name or picture never made the newspapers. Although surely not endorsed by most adults of his time, his action was likely not long remembered by anyone other than the gaggle of girls who witnessed it. The life of a kitten had little value in society, and the emotions of little girls not much more.

We may be talking only about the lives of cats and dogs, but isn't it interesting to consider how much the values of a generation are reflected in the pages of the newspaper?

It may seem surprising sometimes to see such things as bugs or the sentence of someone for harming an animal as the subjects of major front-page stories, but these really are a reflection of your needs, your values, and your expectations.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.