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I consider myself a broadly live-and-let-live sort. I don’t eat animals and treat my garden as a habitat for wildlife, including greenfly, blackfly and the slugs eating all my strawberries. I love bees and tolerate wasps. We’re all just trying to survive; I get it. But here are some things I have said recently (minus the expletives that made up the majority of each sentence) to houseflies: “You’ll be dead soon, because I’m going to murder you”; “Get out – I hate you”; “If you don’t leave, I’ll kill you”; “Shut UP”; “That’s it – you’re dead.”

I can’t stand flies. Bloodlust boils in me at the sight and sound of a bluebottle casually vibing in the fruit bowl, buzzing frantically around my office or banging against the window again and again like a dopey drunk. Opening windows in search of a heatwave cross-breeze has brought them buzzing in; they seemingly have no inclination or ability to leave and it’s driving me wild.

My husband came into the kitchen yesterday to discuss his citizenship application and I couldn’t focus on a word he was saying because I was pursuing three bluebottles, flapping a newspaper. I spent some time with an ill friend recently, but rather than making myself useful, I stalked her flat on self-imposed fly duty, hissing curses. I try to humanely evict them, and I’ve never succumbed to the fly swat, but I confess, houseflies have been harmed on my watch, by my hand.

Why the housefly hate? And can – or should – I learn to love these hairy, noisy intruders?

The case for the prosecution: houseflies are gross. Science says so. One 2023 paper opens with the unequivocal statement: “House flies are well recognised as filth-associated organisms and public nuisances”, explaining they possess more than 200 pathogenic bacteria strains (including salmonella, E coli and campylobacter); another housefly paper is literally called “Flourishing in filth”. They are vectors for infectious disease, disseminators of antimicrobial resistance and “defecate every four to five minutes on any surface on which they land or feed”. It’s not giving “underappreciated cuties” – it’s giving plague. Being viscerally revolted by flies feels like an evolutionary adaptation, designed to keep us safe.

But maybe we need to move beyond our primitive impulses? I did some fly reading, including Jonathan Balcombe’s Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects, an exploration of what he calls this “easy to dislike and hard to love” category of creature, and have emerged ashamed and chastened.

When I stopped eating animals, it was because I didn’t want anything conscious suffering for my dinner – and apparently fruit flies show a capacity to learn, avoiding painful stimuli in lab experiments, exhibiting “rational decision-making” and expressing preferences. (Studies usually use fruit flies, but as Balcombe says, they give an idea of “what other flies might be capable of”.) One study revealed male fruit flies “seem to enjoy ejaculation as much as men”; you may not be surprised to hear there’s an “apparent lack of research on sexual reward in female fruit flies”. Solidarity, sisters.

I’m also someone who regularly expresses concern at declining invertebrate abundance and its knock-on effects, so why am I trying to render these particular invertebrates less abundant in my vicinity? Flies are food for some of my favourite creatures – insectivorous birds, spiders! – and their larvae (maggots), while also hard to love, are vital “ecological anchors”, breaking down and redistributing organic matter, their waste nourishing plants and fungi.

Houseflies matter, and there’s more going on in those hairy raisin bodies and behind those massive, many-lensed eyes than I realised. As Balcombe puts it, failing to respect and revere them (and presumably squashing them with a rolled-up New Statesman) is “not merely a moral mistake; it is a fatal ecological error”.

So I’ve seen the light: no more swatting. I’ll be more respectful, starting with the one who has just invited itself in and is strolling across my desk. When the maddening buzz begins and the red mist threatens to form, I’ll remember it might enjoy orgasms and is definitely doing indispensable ecological work.

But Balcombe’s statement: “I’ve come to enjoy the light tickle of a housefly’s feet against my skin as it runs about”? Argh. Live and let live is one thing, but that? Over my dead, flyblown body.

• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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