This spring/summer so far has been unseasonably wet. Although ordinarily we’re not troubled too much by them, the other day while I was doing some gardening one of these lovelies crossed my path:

The photo doesn’t really do it justice. There was the largeness of the thing, combined with its more-than-generous quotient of glistening slime, not to mention my surprise at seeing it sashaying around right out there in the open.

My immediate response was to want to kill it. I knew it was going to be feasting on plants I would rather it not eat. But since we don’t have that many slugs ordinarily here, I’d never gone about killing one before.

It quickly occurred to me that there seems to be a top limit on the size of the sort of thing I’m willing to squish with my foot, and that limit had definitely been reached long before we hit “slug” on the ladder of the animal kingdom. The same thing is true with flying creatures–I can do mosquitoes and flies, but I balk at those large moths.

My Japanese beetle routine, which involves plopping them into a jar of alcohol, didn’t feel adaptable to something this large, either. Pouring salt on it and watching it shrivel seemed like a bad prospect, too, as well as the trouble involved in the disposing of the corpse. So I watched it slink on by and did nothing.

Looking it up, I see that the suggested solutions are varied, but none seem ideal. Here is the best description I’ve found that explores the available recommended and non-recommended methods for offing a slug:

Now, how to kill the little buggers. The beer-in-the-tuna-can method has never been at all effective for me. The slugs hang over the edge and sip at the beer, but very few have ever fallen in. (They do seem quite partial to beer, however.) As for salt, some say it is extremely cruel, a feature that undoubtedly makes it more attractive to many. But the main disadvantage is this: if you salt or otherwise chemically attack slugs, they dump all their slime in their death throes–years’ worth at once! The stuff is ineradicable and you are stuck with a yard full of repulsive silvery slime globules.

My husband, to prove himself manly, has used the following method: he picks them up with his bare hands (geeklike behavior, in my opinion), and when they roll up in a ball (the burnt sienna-and-orange variety that plague my yard change shape from banana to papaya when attacked), he hurls them out into the street. Then he runs back and forth over them with the car. Charming behavior which I hope was not genetically transmitted to my children.

Perhaps I should just hope we return to our normal amount of rain.