If I had to say one thing that makes me a bit sad about having snails is… they’ll never know how much I love them. I don’t think snails are capable of affection and the love I feel for some of them is just so deep. It’s all I could think about when taking these photos:
It’s not that I find them interesting or fascinating (at least it’s certainly not just that.) It’s love like I felt for my rats or feel for my cats. Maybe there’s a slight level of detachment due to being so aware of their fragility, as a way of protecting my heart. But I adore them. I literally love them. They can’t hear me, they can’t blink. If they feel the vibration of my voice, they tend to hide. They don’t even have a brain, at least not in the normal sense that you’d think of a brain. They are so different from me. But I love them.
I think rats and cats can understand affection. They know, on some level, that I feel love for them. At least I think they do. But even I can’t fool myself into thinking that my snails love me or even that they care for each other. They’re snails. So it does bum me out that they can never process me as a being that cares about them not even in the most basic of senses. But I guess that’s alright.
In other news, knock HARD on wood, but I haven’t seen mites in my Roman snails in some time (maybe two weeks?) and the baby milk snails are growing really well. Their parents seem to continue on the road to recovery, moving a little bit every day, and you know, not dying. So that’s promising.
In addition to this I’m carefully looking after the clutch of Roman snail eggs. I’m so excited for them to hatch.
Here is a video of one of my Roman snails being dumb the other day:
His mouth is open, if you can zoom in. A real winner of a gastropod. 😅
Last video, from a month ago. I forgot to upload it:
