Now hold on just one minute, we slugs also have to have a forum!
Okay, we like Hosta’s and Ligularia’s, but their ugly anyway. Consider it our small effort at saving your garden from ghastly intruders. Remember, we were here first and deserve some respect as editors. Everyone knows, you humans plant too much, too wily-nily – so we gobble a few courgettes, who cares. We are doing you a favor. Eat less — live longer.
Are we not beautiful, brightly colored (much more than your race I would say!, better sexed, textured and psychically well centered for sure. Try crawling over a razor blade sometime!
Anyone will admit that your species is prejudicial as well. Why are some of my relative’s edible and at gourmet prices at that! My eggs are as good as theirs, my seashore relatives are harvested for food, the French love us — why not you? My caviar should be sought after, not left to creepy crawly centipedes and worse. Vas ist loss? My water living cousins are welcomed into your gardens, but we successful land crawlers are not. Is this fair? Let me tell you — we should be protected and welcomed as HERO’S into your garden sanctuaries. Are we bragging? No.
Consider this, in the normal food chain, we provide our bodies to keep your thrushes alive. You want to hear bird songs — then do not poison us. If you see piles of broken shells littered about, that was our relatives sacrifice to keep you happy, same with those frogs — God forbid that is a ghastly way to go, same for snakes. At least the birds get our shelled relatives fast! Skunks and hedgehogs get us too. Please kill them all!
Sorry that was just a subliminal slip, I didn’t mean it — we all have our place. Just read the sentence ten more times. Finally, if you go with that old beer routine, could you at least make it a Pilsner and not a Coors. It is after all, our last meal. Our families are very communal, so are you. Check it out sometime; put a mark on a few of us … you will see that we stay quite near our homes. Do you?
You poison us for eating a few seedlings and ugly plants; how about the fact that we clean up all the dead already decomposing stuff you lounge lizards don’t clean up. Call us janitors, but damn you, do not call us slugs. We work hard! Finally, much like honey, if it were not for our expectorial abilities you wouldn’t be eating mushrooms tonight. Most wild mushroom spawn is ingested and carried by us, then re-deposited (a polite word) for growing. You call yourselves gardeners; what braggarts, we plant much more than most species including those upstarts the ants. Okay, I brag too … so sue me. So what’s in it for us?
Why have we been re-incarnated as slugs? The sex life of course! No blithering about being male or female, which is better, which is stronger. We are both. We are superior; we are The Borg’s of the animal species. I always thought the “What can I do to assist you” would be a great pick up line!
Sorry to digress, I do that a lot. Oh yes, we hermaphrodite’s are named after the Greek Goddess of love Hermaphrodite. What does this mean? It means we can mate any time we want to, and with whomever we want! On top of it all we can do it anywhere. Think about it. Really think about it. So you think the kitchen table is outrageous, think about doing it in a tree while upside down. Best of all the impregnater (see how polite we mollusks are) gets pregnant as well!
. Martha Mollusk: I remain, a slug and damn proud of it!
Books have been written about Bambie’s, moles, rabbits and even those dastardly ants – why not us? Just a plug for a struggling author out there!
Even more I would love an artist to do a Jehovahian slug, spearing a group of gardeners, or the other one was a Moby Slug, with a gardener strapped to its back, plunging a pocket knife into it as it surges away with him/ her. If you can draw, please send one to me — links and credits of course. Contact me on my Google blog.
(C) Herbert Senft 2003