So it was possible to remove the ants peacefully from the house, albeit with an unconventional and ad-hoc method. I'm going to try to expand on this in the abstract.
Without some intervening pressure, it is difficult to resist convention. You absorb from family, media, and the education system at a very young age many of the dominant modes of living, spans of attention, and emotional imprints that will serve you throughout your life. Convention is subject to modification over time, but carries itself with a heavy inertia, so that it takes intense psychological, physical, or environmental pressures to be dislodged from it.
The subjective experience of becoming dislodged is first the understanding of a socioeconomic system and culture from the outside; it becomes an object of study instead of simply the subjective experience of daily living, to be taken for granted, invisible like the air one breathes. It is no longer natural to participate without some mediating layer of analysis and corresponding action.
Another consequence of this is that one's attention begins to drift to other areas of perception previously ignored by convention, all the more so the more distasteful the modes of convention become to one's mind.
So the wisdom of spraying a pesticide all over one's kitchen comes into question, as well as the denial of agency of other creatures that this solution implies, which has become generalized really to everything we don't consider a pet. Convention comes to appear much as a great creeping flow of toxic sludge which settles over the land, death radiating from it in all directions.
So one's attention turns to nature and its many agents. Ants are actually pretty remarkable creatures. They're everywhere, and they're very sophisticated.You can work with them if you want to. And they work for you too. They are excellent at aerating soil and compost for one.
This event also brings attention to the dividing line between external nature and the modern human habitat, the latter of which illustrates how far out modern humankind has gotten. This swept and sterile composition of rearranged matter, a landscape of utility, of objects extracted and abstracted away from living things and formations of earth and rock, a sterile floating compartment removed (perhaps not permanently) from the perpetual processes of nature.
How discomforting it is to spot creatures that account for 15 - 25% of the earth's biomass trickling up and down the pristine surfaces of one's abode! Ah but this sterility protects us from all the poisonous insects, parasites, bacteria, diseases, and other creepy crawlies which threaten us. Of course this comes with a cost as well: the compression and displacement of one's threats into some outer sphere beyond one's living space, with all of it to come rushing back in as soon as the opportunity presents itself. After all, nature still exists there, undergoing change, with or without us, if one can sustain the distinction at least.
It takes a lot of energy, a lot of effort, to maintain that sterile sphere. And you could be contributing to the selection of species which are resistant to the sphere, or which, upon evolving to survive in that outer sphere, could pose a shock to vulnerable bodies in the future. Maybe getting to know the processes of nature little by little again - that is, up close and personal, out of the vacuum of the cleanroom - couldn't hurt.
