MODERN PARABLE: THE HOUSE OF 10,000 SNAILS

Once there was a woman who loved critters of all kinds. She lived with her daughter in a house filled with a menagerie of species. Inside/Outside cats, an old beagle, a parrot, a couple of reptiles as well as those wild outside beasts that she put out food, water and shelter for. She would go out of her way to rescue wild ones and help friends and neighbors with homeless strays. She was starting to enter hoarder territory.

One day her daughter, who was finishing up her the spring term of her Junior year, came home with a 4 large containers of snails. Much her mother's daughter, she brought them home as the lab where she studied was going to dispose of the snails as no one was going to care for them over summer. "They're really easy to take care of" the daughter assured her Mom as she set off a week later to begin a summer internship out-of-state. Easy-peasy and a half page of instructions.

Unfortunately, the daughter only possessed a cursory idea of snail reproduction processes and the mother, having an increasing burden of so many animals to care for, didn't investigate beyond her daughter's notes. As a result, the snails bred like crazy, overrunning their housing in a corner of a spare bedroom. Desperate, the mother put them upstairs in the attic.

For awhile this worked but she didn't grasp that this "out of sight, out of mind" strategy was a really bad mistake. The snails kept reproducing and had begun to crawl behind the walls between the studs looking for space and food. The mother had stopped feeding them and there was a sense of desperation in the snail community. Those who didn't survive created an ungodly stench.

One day, the mother decided that she had had enough and was going to eradicate the snails. She had a mop and a big bucket of bleach and was about the go up the attic access ladder wearing a cloth mask over her nose. She also had in a big 30 gallon trash can lined with a Hefty bag and a snow shovel to use moving the snails. Her ultimate destination was a fire pit out in the back yard where she planned to burn the remains. 

Alas, she never made it. The snails, sensing danger began to rummage frantically behind the walls and the attic floor. The mother, saw some slime weeping from the pull-down ladder access hole. She gave it a poke with her mop handle and suddenly the ceiling gave way. Gallons and gallons of slime came rushing out knocking her off her feet. She couldn't get her footing in the slime which was rising fast. She tried heading for the door on her hands and knees but somehow the slime began to solidify. She was stuck like a dinosaur in a tar pit and eventually drowned.

She was found 2 weeks later by authorities who were responding to a safety check call by the daughter. The house was an unbelievable, stinking mess with starving/dying animals mixed in with the thigh high slime. Experts estimated that there had been up to 10,000 snails living in that house. 

Lesson of our story: beware of the child who brings home  critters from school.