Rosemary and I were farmers for a little while and the land that we had was what you would call virgin land. It had never ever been farmed before. It was many, many kilometers away from anybody else's farm. For three years we had no bugs or birds eating our crops. For three years everything grew wonderfully and we had good lush fruit and vegetables.
Then all of a sudden the bugs found us. The first time I discovered the bugs was when I was reaching for a beautiful cucumber, one of the long skinny ones, beautifully formed, ready to pick. When I grabbed it, my hand went straight into a watery mush. It was fruit fly. The outside looks perfect, but the inside is totally rotten. We had a decision to make. Do we spray and kill the bugs in order to keep growing the vegetables that we were selling a little bit of? We weren't making tons of money, but it was part of our income. We decided to stop growing the vegetables so that we wouldn't have to kill.
Now what about fleas, lice and scabies? When you go to a doctor and you have some bugs on you or in you, like intestinal worms, the doctor's intention is to save you. The doctor's intention is not to kill creatures, it's to save a human being. The intention is to save yourself. That's different to growing vegetables and killing on that level. There's a distinct difference made within Buddhism on these two.