Guy Convinced ‘All Spiders Are Innocent’ Repeatedly Lets Himself Get Bit By Black Widows and Brown Recluses

I don’t know much about spiders, but I’ve met enough Australians to know not to trust them — the spiders, not the Aussies.

That said, I’m also an idiot. Maybe spiders are just fine to hang out with. Heck, maybe you can even let them bite you and fill you with their venom and still be totally fine. I’m not going to test it to find out, but this guy on YouTube certainly will.

His name is Jack, from Jack’s World of Wildlife. In his YouTube videos, he travels the world getting bit by all sorts of “dangerous” creatures, including spiders and bullet ants. Basically, if it can bite you, Jack’s probably been bitten by it.

However, Jack’s mission is twofold. First, he wants to show you the beauty of nature (by documenting all the ways it can fuck you up). Second, he wants to popularize an interesting idea — maybe spider bites aren’t that bad?

For example, one of the major fears around spider bites, especially those of spiders like the brown recluse, is necrosis. The problem, people like Jack argue, is that this possibility has made it a default response for medical personnel, even when the actual likelihood of the problem being a spider bite is pretty minor.

Jack’s not alone in this idea. Spider expert Rick Vetter wrote a piece on the University of California, Riverside website noting that doctors in places as far north as Canada and Alaska have claimed to have patients with necrosis stemming from brown recluse bites — despite the fact that “the brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) is native only to the South and central Midwestern states,” and the climate that far north would be “inhospitable” to the spider.

That said, I think we can all agree that there’s gotta be a better way to prove this than getting bitten all the time.