Fake News Letter BlocksPart of the problem of arachnophobia is that it is reinforced by the media’s love affair with making spiders the bad guys. I am sure a lot of you might have read the recent stories about Chessington World of Adventures releasing hundreds of Fen Raft Spiders back into the wild. Sadly, instead of celebrating the conservation efforts, most of these news features use  scare tactics and  are written with a negative angle, sensationalised to spark people’s interests. It may be written in such a way to get more attention but sadly for arachnophobes it only increases their anxiety and false understanding of spiders. Here is one such of many similar news reports done by The Telegraph: (Warning, spider pictures are in this feature)

[hyperlink style=”1″ href=” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/20/hundreds-of-giant-spiders-which-can-grow-as-big-as-rats-released/” font_color=”#f16c20″ align=”center”]Telegraph Spider Feature[/hyperlink]

In the feature, they even plug in a youtube video of the “5 Most Deadliest Spiders” in the middle of the article which instantly gets people feeling scared and uncomfortable while reading about a perfectly harmless species. I have read many other ridiculous online news features recently about spiders. One was about a house spider that was “terrorising” a person at their work. Spiders really want nothing more than to get out of your house and away from the big scary creature (you) that can squash them in a flash.

One of the helpful things we do at the Spider Courage Experience is educate people about spiders and their true intentions. They don’t want to bite you, they don’t want to chase you, they do not want to land on you and they are not “watching you.” Knowledge is power and is a strong tool in fighting your phobia. Now if only the media could work with us and stop all the spider scare mongering! Ok rant over! :p

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