I'm not against spider legs, what I am against is people who don't understand what they're doing spider legging a pick and having it roll onto power lines, a house or worse because they thought that the spider legs would prevent it.
The point of rigging is to attach the CofG of the lift directly below the hook, alot of times this is impossible with a single sling because just like in Allmarks example the CofG is in midair between branches so you need multiple slings.
If anybody remembers that episode of Nosak Raw where he put the frontend of that altec way up in the air, well the pick before that he was "spider legging" a lateral limb with two nylon slings and he didn't pretension so one of the slings came out of the hook leaving only one, guess what the remaining sling was placed right at the CofG! The pick came out perfectly (surprising for nosak). If that hadn't happend and the if climber was above the cut with any part of his body then the butt end would hurt him far worse than the next lift did.
If you go to
www.nosakraw.com and watch episode #7 at 6 min, you'll see what I'm talking about, and what I'm against. I know its Nosak and pretty much every arborist out there is against his practices, but there's a lot of guys out there like him.
Sorry if this comes of angery it wasn't intended to, just informative.
