Tuesday, June 08, 2010

The invincibility of slugs

Matt Harvey has a poem on slugs,
ending thusly:
"listen chum, you are disposable
look at my thumb, it is opposable
unwelcome invertebrate
this might just hurt a bit
I pluck you and chuck you
into distant dew-drenched greenery
isn’t that mean of me?
slug, when all is said and done
you can  hide but you can’t run"
.
But the slug always has an answer.

Slug-chucker,
I mock your expert fling
My slime so loves your thumb,
I land in the muck at your foot.

You have no choice but' kill me.
And I will fill your lily livered,
liberal dreams
with guilt.

(c) Rlawson 8.6.10

4 comments:

Stuart Jeffery said...

chickens help but avoid having a cat. haven't had a slug or snail problem for years.

DocRichard said...

How do cats make slugs worse? Why has no-one developed a cat that eats slugs?
Chickens are interesting, but the fox would be especially interested. So chickens wd not be able to roam freely, so the only slug free area wd be the chicken coop.
I think slugs are god's way of showing us that we are not the masters of the universe.

Anonymous said...

We have cats and chickens (and slugs!)
The slugs seem to love the cat food (both dry and 'wet' varieties) and swarm in through the cat flap to get it.
The chickens also like the cat food (mainly the dry) and one of them is an expert at escaping from her run and getting in through the cat-flap to eat it.
Perhaps if we got rid of the cats the slugs would have less to eat and the chickens would be more inclined to eat the slugs in the absence of cat food. Of course, the main problem with slugs is that they eat our vegetables, unlike our escapee chickens who only uproot them and scatter them across the garden...catch 22.

Rob.

DocRichard said...

Well, Rob, there we have it. In a nutshell. The slugs have got us tied up in a sack, which they have put over a barrel, and are shooting into it.

I must say beer is good for them, but I'm buggered if I'm going to pay £2 a pint for humane slug killers. They turn their horns up at ullage. I will try again to get the barsteward at the Crown to reserve the slops for my slugs.

I confess that I use scissors on damp mornings.