As I write this, an ant is crawling across the knuckles of my left hand. After the period at the end of the last sentence I put my hand to the window ledge, allowing her to crawl off and continue the endless search for sustenance. In the summer months, the kitchen is overrun with these little red folk. They show up everywhere, perusing every nook and cranny for edibles.

I know some of you readers are thinking "An ant was crawling on your hand and you calmly allowed it to walk off and continue on its merry way? I would have squashed that thing." Here's an appeal to you from me, a friend of the ants.

I've been vegetarian for almost 25 years. I don't often speak or write about it because, as an issue, I've found vegetarian versus carnivore more divisive than even red versus blue, God-fearing versus non-believer or Windows versus Mac. The decision to not eat flesh or use animal-based products puts front and center the question of what, exactly, humans are. Are we animals, doing what animals do? Do we have a choice in what we do, using that marvelous brain of ours which seems to make us different from most other animals?

Ants are amazing creatures. Taken as a whole, an ant colony itself is also an amazing creature. Each ant, in the way it communicates and interoperates with its sisters via pheromone traces, is both a physical neuron and the charge which travels through a neuron in the hive mind of the ant colony. From the simple actions of each ant working in concert with other ants, complex behavior and directed intelligence arise. We see individual ants, small pest insects driving us crazy with their very presence, because we're not looking at the whole picture. Watch ants sometime, up close and personal. They never stop talking to each other. It's most intense on the dense highways they create when the overmind says "Move!" but you can see it even in the sparse interactions of scouts and searchers wandering your kitchen tiles.

When you kill an ant, you destroy a thought.

If ants form a highway to food in my kitchen, it's my fault. I'm the higher life-form here, with evolved reasoning and the ability to extrapolate, right? If I leave food out where they can find it, who should pay the price? They're only doing what they do, going about their lives. A simple sealable bin or ziploc will keep them from devouring my morsels, as will regularly keeping my kitchen clean and crumb-free. These are real, sustainable fixes rather than extermination, which is only permanent once all ants, everywhere, are gone. A little extra work on my part allows me to coexist with the hive, rather than kill it to further my own laziness.

It's a sad state we find ourselves in, in relation to other species on the world. You will likely see the extinction of all large animals in your lifetime. Your children will live in a world without bears or tigers, with no elephants or whales, simply because humans will not use our marvelous brains which make us different to control our own numbers. We kill everything around us just by expanding. Here's a current ratio to consider, indicative of our failure: 6 billion people / 5 thousand tigers.

Saving a tiger is hard. For most, they're not part of everyday experience. They're big and wary and wild and you won't find them in your kitchen. But saving an ant... that you can do. They're small and local and they don't harm people, they just want something to eat. Let's start small, and work outwards: next time you see an ant, let it crawl onto a piece of paper and move it someplace safely away from you.

Step over, not on.