Black widows have a much worse bite than brown recluses. A black widow bite won't kill you, it'll just make you hurt so much you'll wish you were dead. There's

Black widows have a much worse bite than brown recluses. A black widow bite won't kill you, it'll just make you hurt so much you'll wish you were dead. There's antivenom but it's not without its own side effects so sometimes your best option is just to "ride out the pain." Contrast this with brown recluses, which rarely bite and when they do it's often painless and easy to treat. I have so many black widows living in my house I've given up trying to get rid of them. I leave them alone and they take care of flies and leave me alone. No brown recluses live in my state, but still people here worry far more about the benign, nonexistent brown recluse than the much more potentially dangerous and prevalent black widow. Or they get all bent about the big tarantulas here, which are so harmless that little kids (who know the truth) collect them and keep them as pets. Snakes are a similar story. We have a lot of rattlesnakes where I live, and they're dangerous if you get bit and don't go to the hospital. A better plan is just not to get bit, and that's generally pretty easy with a snake unless you surprise it. I relocate rattlesnakes when I find them in my yard and my neighbors call me to relocate them from their yards, but the prevailing mentality in most people is to kill the snake first and ask questions later. Which is a shame since most snakes in the U.S. are nonvenomous and all snakes decrease the population of vermin like rodents that carry nasty diseases like plague and hantavirus. People need to get over their prejudices.