Thanks for asking
.1. No, we had very little reason to be afraid of our fighting spiders because they were only about 5 mm - 7 mm across.
[I AM afraid of large, hairy spiders. I try to be rational and not have a gut reaction of fear and "kill, kill", but if I see a hairy spider of (say) more than 3-4 cm, then I do get frightened. You should have seen me in Malaysia or Australia, trying to get some big ones out of my room - terrified, but not wanting to kill it!]
I may have mentioned that our fighting spiders were very "cute". They had little flat "faces" with 4 - 8 eyes (I can't exactly remember how many) in two rows on the face, and they could look back at you, if you bent over to look at them. I always found this very amusing. They were also extremely docile: they would not run away from humans, and would walk around on your hand if you let them.
2. No, as far as I know, they were not cannibal. In fact, they were not really fierce fighters either.
This is how it worked: each boy who had a spider kept it in an empty matchbox, which was kept shut with a rubber band wrapped around it. Inside was the spider, with 2 small leaves for it to hide in. The boys gave the spider a little glob of spit for drink (I don't know if spiders actually drink, but this is what the boys did), and they occasionally put a dead fly in for it to eat (again, nobody seems to have known if the spider ever ate the fly - it was all dark in there once the box was closed, so perhaps the spider could never find the fly, and besides, they're hunting spiders, so I don't know if they would know what to do with a dead fly; but this was the traditional way of "keeping" them - a glob of spit and a dead fly!). The boys would keep the matchboxes in their trouser pocket or in their school-bag.
So, during the recess, two boys with spiders would "challenge" one another. They would use one of the match-boxes as a "boxing ring". Both spiders would be taken out of their individual boxes, and put on opposite corners of one of the flat surfaces of the box, usually the bottom (outside) surface of the box, because that did not have the label on it, so it was uniform in colour and everyone could see the spiders well. All the other boys would gather round to watch the match.
Once the two spiders saw one another, they would rush towards one another (towards the centre of the flat surface). Once they made contact, they would "lock" front legs, and sort of wrestle with one another for about 5-10 seconds.
After this wrestle, one of them would chicken out, and unlock front-legs, and run and hide on the opposite surface of the box, where the "winner" could not see it.
This was the end of the "match", and the spiders would be put back into the boxes.
The keeping of fighting spiders would be a sort of "craze", like yoyos or tops, etc. One would notice 2-3 boys with spiders, who would challenge one another. And then more boys would go into the bushes to get their own spiders, there would be more and more matches, and then, after about 1-2 weeks, the craze would die down, less and less boys would have spiders, until after 3 weeks, nobody would have spiders anymore, until (maybe 5-6 months) later, when the craze would start up again, for another week or so.
During any craze, some of the boys would build up a reputation for having "champion" spiders, which they were very proud of.
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Postscript:
Very often a spider which lost 2-3 matches would be killed because the boy was disappointed with the performance of his spider (something which always used to upset me - I tried to persuade people to just let the losing spiders go). I think that a lot of spiders also just died of starvation because I don't really think that they ate those flies.
Anyway, it was a very colourful part of my childhood - those fights were very exciting to watch!
Sim.
