Snips and Snails and Kittycat Tails

Oh kitten power. Wolfie brought over the newest member of his family yesterday, rescued from a future of hard knocks on the streets of Austin and tossed into a sumptuous new life complete with unconditional love and soft meats steeped in gravy.

He has an ongoing contest to decide the little hero's handle and my favorites so far are "Jimmy Cream", "Kidbones" and "Cell Phone." What is your best feline moniker? Ruby is set on naming him "Baby". (disappointing considering her own menagerie is peppered with awesome ones such as Bean, Daisy, Dinah, Sunny, Koko, Emerald, Gwalfo, Roscoe, Rose, Minty, Michi, Lavender, Little Girl Blue, yes-Kidbones and Hans)

This fuzzy guy was smothered in kisses and rough love until he passed out from exhaustion so we tumbled out of doors to exercise the neighbor pup and freshen the fig tree. Ruby was delighted to find a large sleeping snail and was desperate to wake him so we plopped him into a bowl of water and watched in fascination as his gooey highness slowly emerged.

At our last house we had a biblical plague of these same largish garden snails, I thought they were kinda kitschy at first, then when I couldn't play in the yard without the inevitable "POP!cruuuunch" underfoot I became enraged with disgust and spent an hour collecting a couple hundred of the buggers in a box and deposited them down the block in an empty lot. It didn't really help curb the population though and it still took me quite a few barefoot mollusk murders before I learned my lesson and started wearing shoes constantly.

What a boring story. The point was: after touching it's weird stem eyes and watching it slime around with rapt attention for 20 minutes I convinced them to release him so we could go inside and learn all about snails on the internet.

These particular ones are called Otala Lactea, or Milk Snails and are in fact, edible! Not kosher of course, but a delicacy in France and free in Texas. So, if you have a hankerin' for fresh escargot I have the hot foraging tip ya'll.

I have included below a strangely satisfying sped-up video of a milk snail eating lettuce. More fun snail facts here.