by Donya on Thu Oct 14, 2004 2:13 am
While I, personally, have never frozen a snail, there are a few good reasons why it is considered by many people to be along the lines of putting a dog or cat to sleep by lethal injection rather than by dumping a cat or dog into a freezing lake to euthanize it:
1. Snails are not warm blooded. When a warm blooded animal freezes, it is torture because the body tries to maintain the temperature and you wind up with hypothermia, etc.. Snails are not homeothermic so their reaction is completely different from a mammal or bird "freezing to death".
2. Because snails are cold blooded, decreasing the temperature makes them slow down, just like with reptiles. If you make a reptile too cold, they go into a sleep-like state where they are not really conscious. Make them colder than that and nervous functions cease slowly while unconscious. Snails have a less sophicstocated nervous system, and so the same thing would happen, only with even less consciousness.
3. Snails are not designed to survive freezing temperatures, so the case of freezing something and reanimating it by accident are nonexistant in snails (I dont' see this argument anywhere on this thread, but I have heard it outside the forum). There have been some horrific stories of what happens when people try to euthanize box turtles by freezing, and then they reanimate when thawed with tissue damage. Box turtles are designed to withstand freezing temperatures, snails and most other cold blooded animals arn't. So, snails once frozen will not go through any similar kind of grusome event like that.
Now, while I am neither pro nor anti-euthanisia most of the time, here is a case to consider: I had a snail a few months ago that literally fell out of its shell. No shell, just unrolled snail. Every time the poor thing moved it winced and squirmed about in pain. There was no fixing it, and the poor thing died a horrible death from swelling, rigid paralysis, bleeding, and foot cramping (I had never seen this before, but the foot shrinks involuntarily to 1/4 or less it's normal size while the snail is struggling). There was no way I could make that snail comfortable, and it took 4 long days to die that way. After that, if I see an identical case in the future, I am strongly going to consider the freezer.
However, for cases of "culling" and euthanizing an animal that is not clearly in its death throws (literally), I do not go near the freezer and try to treat the animal's health condition(s) to the best of my abilities.
Those are just my thoughts on the subject. I strongly believe that this is a personal matter for people because of differing religious and other bliefs, and everyone has the right to hold a different opinion.
EDIT: A remark on bettas...they are a fish that has a much bigger temperature tollerance than snails, both for hot and cold water, so I would put them in the same category as box turtles and some frogs with similar problems. There are some species differences in reaction to cold temperatures, but snails seem to have the reptile one.