Posted on 09/07/2017 2:47:46 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Episode aired on pay TV after earlier being deemed inappropriate for audiences in Australia, home to dangerous spiders
A controversial episode of Peppa Pig has been pulled off the air in Australia for a second time, after complaints it told children to pick up and play with dangerous spiders.
Mister Skinny Legs, a 2004 episode of the popular children’s show, was removed from online publication by the national public broadcaster, the ABC, in 2012 for sending the “inappropriate” message that spiders were friendly and not to be feared.
In the offending episode, Daddy Pig tells a frightened Peppa that spiders are “very very small” and “can’t hurt you” after the eponymous arachnid enters her room. The children are then depicted picking the spider up, tucking it into bed and offering it some tea.
This advice from the British-produced show was deemed to be “inappropriate for Australian audiences” and the ABC banned it from future broadcast. The episode had not been broadcast on TV because of its unsuitability, but was “accidentally published online due to a technical problem”, the ABC said at the time.
Not all Australian spiders are “very, very small” and some can hurt you. Last year footage of a huntsman carrying a mouse up a fridge in the Queensland town of Coppabella became an internet sensation – the huntsman’s leg span can be as large as 16cm. Australia’s dangerous spider species include the venomous redback spider, the funnel-web spider, white-tailed spider and wolf-spider, according to the Australian Museum. It estimates 2,000 people are bitten each year by redback spiders, and 40 by funnel webs. Data released in January revealed 12,600 people were admitted to hospital for spider bites between 2000 and 2013.
On 25 August, the episode was aired again on Nick Jr, a children’s channel affiliated with Nickelodeon
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Letting the spiders live has a great benefit: They eat all the pest insects. For years I had a problem with meal moths (nasty things that get into your cookies, cereal, flour, bread etc - laying their eggs - which soon hatch into gross little worms).
Most pesticides make me sick, so having the spiders eat up all the meal moths was great.
No just 6” and change.
Sounds like Peppa would make a great sidekick for Bill Nye.
Personally I would rely on keeping all screen doors closed rather than spiders...............
And they can bite through a toenail too. Eeek.
Yep 6 or 7 inches would be about right for the length of the legs. Some of these are just huge.
BTW, you need to change your tag line to Summer is coming. It hit the upper 20s in Perth today :)
Good advice, but meal moths don't always come through an open screen door.
Mine arrived in a box of cereal purchased at a supermarket. When the box was opened, out flew a cloud of meal moths. That cloud began a years-long infestation. I sprayed pesticides and began storing vulnerable food in moth-tight containers. But they still persisted.
The only thing that finally worked to get rid of them was ..............spiders.
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