Dear Readers, I have always been fascinated by snails – back in 2019 I wrote this piece after observing all the molluscs popping out into the front garden on a wet day. And so I was very interested to read about the phenomenon of ‘snail tapping’.
What in the okey-dokey is ‘snail tapping’, I hear you ask? The theory goes that if you suddenly pick up a snail in order to, say, move it off of the pavement so that it doesn’t get trodden on, the snail feels pain as it is ripped away from the ground. However, if you give the shell a gentle tap first, the snail will withdraw, and you can pick the snail up without causing it any discomfort and move it to a more suitable location (say, your neighbour’s garden 🙂 )
Well, I regret to say that I have long been a ‘snail-ripper’, as there are few things sadder than the gentle ‘pop’ of a snail shell bursting underfoot as you run out through the rain to put the wheelie bins out. But since reading this, I have turned into a ‘snail-tapper’, and it certainly makes lifting the little chaps/chapesses easier when they aren’t clinging on for grim death. How long it takes them to recover from the trauma of thinking that they’ve just been grabbed by a song thrush is anybody’s guess.
Incidentally, if you regularly ‘tap’ a particular snail, s/he will eventually stop withdrawing because s/he has worked out that you aren’t a predator, and it takes a lot of energy to fling yourself back into your shell on a regular basis. This implies to me that snails can learn, and is yet another example of even ‘primitive’ animals being a lot more complicated than we give them credit for.
Do snails feel pain, though? Does being ‘ripped’ from the pavement cause them discomfort? There has been a lot of work done on pain perception in invertebrates over the past twenty years, and it’s always a bit problematic – even amongst humans it’s impossible to know how much pain someone is in, as one person’s excruciating might be someone else’s just about tolerable. What’s generally recognised is that in sentient animals there are two components to pain – the actual physical effect, and the ‘suffering’ that can be brought on by anticipation/past experience/fear etc etc. Do snails feel a moment of angst as they feel themselves grabbed from above? Or is the pain purely that of having their ‘foot’ suddenly torn away without any chance to withdraw?
Well, who knows, but I prefer not to cause gratuitous suffering if at all possible, so I shall be tapping away in future. And here is a short and slightly-out-of-focus video of a snail as it ambles around the edge of a tray before being returned to the garden. Enjoy!
And finally, here’s Fleur Adcock’s poem ‘For a Five-Year-Old’. Much to think about, here…
For a Five-Year-Old
A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.
I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.
I had no idea! I’m glad to know this, although we have more slugs than snails. I just let them do their thing. I saw a beautiful snail in Cornwall yesterday. It was on an exterior glass brick of a beach toilet. ai was a but worried about no food being there, but it was hunkered down, so I left it.
I enjoyed the soul of the poem, but I cringed at “drowned your kittens!” I see she was born in 1934, so I’m hoping she was drowning kittens well in the past, before we sterilized cats instead. I was going to read this to my son, but he is a tender person who loves cats and is kind to all living creatures, so perhaps not.
He told me recently with a kind of shame that when he was about 10, he was in a camp site toilet and felt something crawling on him. He panicked and knocked it off. It was a large moth and he felt terribly guilty as it was clearly dying on the floor. He crushed it to put it out of its pain. Ten years later, he still feels bad about it.
What a lovely, gentle boy you’ve raised. We could do with more of them, for sure. And in East London where I grew up, people were drowning kittens (and puppies) well into the 1950s because the charities who would neuter cats for a small fee were overwhelmed, and generally people couldn’t afford the fee. It took until the 1960s before most people realised that neutering was the only sensible thing to do. Even so, I still occasionally come across people who think that turning their female unspayed cat out when they come into heat so that she can have ‘one litter’ is a good thing to do. You can imagine my response to that one!
I can’t imagine being able to do that to tiny defenseless creatures. It would give me nightmares!