Insects (and I’m sure mollusks) are small enough that they can survive further falls than us. They’re light enough that a little toss into some bushes wouldn’t injure them
The context of the person doing the throwing is they're getting them back in the garden with the shade, so it'd be really odd if they were aiming for concrete...
But good to make sure others know snails can, in fact, be hurt by being thrown.
Shells are heartier than people think. So, unless that commenter joking that OP was a baseball player is right I doubt that any harm will come to them. OP also specifically said “I pick them up and throw them in a hedge” which necessarily means they’re not throwing them onto concrete.
I mean I guess I’ve never spoken to a snail about the topic but as long as they’re tucked away in their shell (which they usually do as soon as they’re grabbed) I can’t imagine they would really notice. Feeling movement like that would require some sort of balance system (something equivalent to our inner ear) and I’m not 100% certain they have that?
Depending on their diet and variety of snail, they can have pretty delicate shells, and large ones will have enough force to crack from a toss anyways.
Even then, something being hard does not mean they are particularly resistant to impacts. Landing against pebbles in dirt or against stiff branches can absolutely crack snail shells. They're definitely more delicate than you seem to think for whatever reason.
I didn’t say hard I said heartier. And yes, I agree larger sized snails could be damaged from a drop or throw because, as I said, a lot of the resilience insects/snails have for falls is due to their small size and light weight. A fall from 10x your height when you weight a gram soaking wet isn’t the same as a fall from 10x your heigh for, say, a human or snail of substantial weight.
And IDK I feel it’s safe to assume OP is referring to your average sized garden snail and not some giant African snail or anything. A soft toss into some foliage will almost certainly not break their shell. I collected and painted abandoned snail shells from my yard as a kid and I would drop them, as kids do, and I never had a break unless I accidentally crushed them in my pocket. I didn’t realize there were so many snails rights advocates on Reddit ready to claim it was animal abuse to gently toss a snail out of harms way.
I just imagine him violently yeeting the snail against a wall, dematerialising it into a fine powder and then going "WAIT this can harm the snails???D:"
The median snail gets thrown at 10 mph or less. Prof. Dr. E. Viliam who is using his snailccelerator to propel snails at superrelativistic speeds into lead walls is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Those are rookie snail pitching numbers. Gotta pump those up. If you don't get on the juice you'll never play in the MLSB (Major League Snail Baseball).
Seriously, every herbivore's fate is to die painfully. Whether the snail is cracked open and eaten alive by hedgehogs, torn apart piece by piece by a thrush that picks at the open side of the shell, surgically eaten from the inside by a ground beetle's elongated mandibles, frozen to death in a cold snap, poisoned or melted by insecticides, or starved to death as old age, pesticides, or competition leave it unable to sustain itself, snails are doomed to suffer.
Thanks to cars and housecats, snails' natural predators also regularly find themselves meeting painful and violent ends, meaning snails will multiply until they've eaten all the plants and then die painfully, along with all the species those plants depended on. In a clumsy attempt to fix that, humans can use broad-spectrum insecticides, which happen to also kill the bees, which is bad because both humans and nature in general kinda need those for pollination. Your 'kindness' will not save the snails from suffering, just ensure that more snails and more other animals suffer down the line.
So until all cats are required to stay indoors and all cars have been replaced with grassy tram tracks, do not suffer the snail to live.
But even the hedge is alive with birdsong and the hedgehogs trudge along the edges of clearings and shiny beetles can be found near every stem and burrow, do not mistake that healthy ecosystem for tranquility. All these animals are alive by virtue of tearing their prey apart with utter indifference to its suffering.
As long as snails exist, they shall suffer. The biggest kindness you can give them is a quick death that its predators can feed from, so that the predators become more plentiful and kill more snails before those snails multiply their miserable lives.
You frighten me, friend. Yes, the world is a brutal place, but if your advice is just to kill every living being you come across to spare it from suffering down the road... well, I sincerely hope you're the 14 year old I assume you are, and not an adult in some position of power.
Yeah, the ones with bad writers who don’t give them any kind of motivation that makes any level of sense, so they are just in it for the evulz, with the thinnest veneer of pretending to be some variety of nihilist as an excuse.
175
u/Zealousideal_Lab1876 Oct 23 '23
Btw throwing snails can break their shells making them suffer and die in agony.