What Is a Snail?

Paleolithic man ate snails. So do modern Frenchmen. Every year thousands of them are plucked from trees, bushes, walls and the good soil of Burgundy, are pulled rudely out of their shells, boiled, dressed with garlic, stuffed back and served up sizzling hot on tin plates to be downed between gulps of rich red Chambertin. So delectable is the escargot that the best breeds of him are becoming scarce. To restrict snail-plucking, the Department Council of the Cote d'Or met lately at Dijon, soon found itself embroiled in a hopeless argument over the question of what is a snail.

The council had appealed to the National Ministry of Agriculture for regulatory measures. Replied the Ministry: "One cannot regulate the gathering of snails unless one can define them, is it not? Under what category of animals whose breeding and marketing are regulated by the Government are we to classify them? They are not game. They are not fish. Snails do not come under any category of animals that we have listed. We regret, therefore, messieurs, that we can do nothing for you."

Cried Councillor Jules Guichet: "But certainly the snail is game. One hunts it, does one not? The game warden is trying to escape his responsibility."

Spoke M. Gallard, prefect of the Cote d'Or, witheringly: "No animal is game that one does not hunt for sport with a weapon. Does one need a gun for snails? Does one perhaps require horses and a pack of hounds? Does one sound a horn? But no! One simply pulls him off a wall with the fingers. That, messieurs, is not sport."

Councillor Andre Fabre suggested that the snail was a domestic animal. Other councillors promptly objected that domestic snails had already deteriorated from inbreeding.* Only the wild herds needed protection.

Councillor Henri Espadrille (consulting a dictionary): "The snail is a castropod mollusk, or shellfish (which are not fish), like the whelk, the slug, the mussel, the limpet, the oyster. Messieurs, we can regulate the snail as seafood, for he is really an oyster."

In desperation the council called in Maitre Jevain, prominent attorney of Dijon. After much thought Maitre Jevain opined as follows: "The Government lists a category of domestic animals under the generic title of horned beasts. Does not the snail conform to that definition?''

*Though a hermaphrodite like the leech (see above), the snail nevertheless goes courting. He carries a dartlike structure (spiculum amoris) which is discharged during the preliminary stages of mating, stimulating his companion to autoerotic activity.

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