Sedona's Guide to Snail Care
Only second to dogs, snails are the best pet’s ever. They’re cute as shit, they’re extremely friendly, and they cost less than dirt to take care of.
Types of pet snails: There are a wide variety of snails to choose from if you’re jonesing for a squishy little friend. If you live in the EU or UK you can keep a giant African land snail as a pet. Unfortunately the US is extremely strict about imported animals, but there are still a few varieties of store bought snails that you can adopt into your little slime family. Regardless of where you live it’s pretty simple to find a garden snail in your local area.
Finding snails: Snails tend to scuttle around the side walk pretty often, but once you start trying to find them they seem to be quite the anomaly. The very best time to look for snails is just after it rains, however if you live in a dry place where there is very little rain, you can go on the hunt in the earlier hours of the morning.
Once you find snails try to find their breed via pictures online. This is important to make sure they’re not carnivorous or in some way harmful to us human folk. Once your snail have the cleanest of bills of health it’s time to take your slimey little friend home.
Habitat: It’s pretty simple to make a snail habitat. I prefer to use materials from the great outdoors to play it on the cheap side, but if you’re a big spender you can surely pimp your snails ride. You can happily fit up to about eight garden snails in a shoe box sized plastic container. Many use hermit crab tanks, but my slime family lives in a shoe box sized storage container with holes poked through the top with a sewing pin. (Obviously don’t use a cardboard for your snail tank, it will get mushy and the snails will try to eat it which could cause them to get impacted.)
Fill the bottom 1.5-3 inches of the enclosure with substrate, you can buy some from a pet store, but I use fresh soil from the same area a captured my snails in; Never put sand as the main substrate in your snails enclosure, the dry sand can get stuck in your snail’s shell.
I like to toss in some moss and small uprooted patches of grass to the corners of the tank. You can also add a smooth rock or clean stick or two into the enclosure for your snails to climb on and hide under.
Diet: If by some miracle you’ve made it this far you’re probably wondering a great deal about what the heck these little guys eat. Snails eat a wide variety of things, from leafy greens and flowers, to oat meal. You can feed them just about anything from the area that you found them in, along with lettuce, spinach, and just about every other kitchen fruit or vegetable. For some extra goodness you can give them a little snack of cuttle-bone, crushed egg shells, the crushed shells of long-dead snails, and even crushed dog biscuits. Snails also love organic baby food.
Foods to avoid- Avoid anything salted for obvious reasons. You should also avoid pastas, rice, or anything else that can expand and cause bloating and/or impaction. If you’re worried about a specific food, go ahead and do a quick google search of dangerous foods for snails.
Breeding and egg laying: The vast majority of snails are hermaphroditic, this does not mean that they can self-reproduce, but this does mean that most likely if you are housing more than one snail in close quarters they well at some point mate and lay some eggs. Some snails will lay hundreds of eggs at a time and lay them rather often. Unless you are planning on taking care of hundreds of little babies, at some point in your snail parenting you will have to dispose of some eggs. If you have locally caught snails you can bury then in a very shallow hole outside, but if you have imported snails you will unfortunately have to kill off some snail eggs. It is easiest to do this with in the first couple of days of discovery; you can do so buy boiling, microwaving, but the simplest way is freezing.
There is a surprisingly large community of snail owners on the interwebs, and your every question can be answered there. If you have any other questions, message me!
