A friend of mine heard about the beer method of killing slugs, so she set out cat food cans buried so the rim was flush with the ground and filled them with beer. Then she forgot about them for a few days. When she remembered to look, the cans were still there, but they were empty of both beer and slugs. Mystified, she refilled the cans with beer. That night, she had to get up to let the cat in, and she saw a family of skunks in the garden, happily sucking up the beer with the slugs. Beer and hors d'oeuvre! My friend also sets out hummingbird feeders, but that same summer she had a problem with ants crawling up the tree trunks and out onto the limbs, down the cord to the feeders and crawling all over them. She got out more empty cat food cans and dumped the old sugar/water into them from the feeders. She noticed that many ants found the sugar water and crawled in, with many drowning. Once again, the skunks came to visit, tipping over the cans and eating the contents. Ooooo! Dessert, with a touch of spice! In summer, she found several nests of ground-nesting yellowjackets. So she poured some cheap dollar-store pancake syrup on top of the nests at dusk. Sure enough, her little black and white scavengers came through, attracted to the syrup and discovered the yellowjacket nests (they love yellowjackets), and they ripped up the nests and ate the contents. Sweet, spicy and crunchy! Mother Nature DID have a plan! Sue

Lettuce, spinach, cucumber, and other greens should be fine for snails to live off of. They will eat fish food and seem fine, but it'd be a good idea to check the ingredients first. I'm not sure how much it takes to kill a snail, but they are sensitive to copper. Copper containing preservatives seem to be common in dried fish foods, so I'd be cautious about using them as a snail's main diet. Ethoxyquin is also a common preservative, and as far as I know it is toxic to invertebrates, but again I don't know about what amount of ethoxiquin preserved food it will take to harm a snail. I'd play it safe and give them a good serving of fresh leafy greens as their main diet.

The first time I ever tried to get rid of snails, well, I was young and idealistic and didn't want to cause pain to any creature, so I gathered them up in a garbage bag and took it to a local park at night. I set the bag down on the grass, opened it a bit and took off. However, one backward look gave me a horrifying sight: a homeless lady was eagerly going to retreive the bag, perhaps hoping for a nice dinner.

Many years ago I lived in a tiny house with a tiny yard that had a ridiculous number of slugs. I'm not sure if the the slugs were coming from the surrounding woods, under the house foundation, or where, but one dared not walk outside barefoot in the evenings for fear of having a slug sliding up between the toes. (shudder!) Since it was a small yard with mostly rough field grass and only a few garden areas, we tried setting traps (the beer type,) but the found the traps were overwhelmed by the sheer number of slugs. We ended up getting some 6" spikes and going out on damp evenings and skewering slugs and then scraping them off into cans of soapy water which we would then be sure were full of water and fasten lids onto to drown the slugs. We also put out boards and during the day we would flip the boards and squish the slugs which had taken shelter from the day's heat. I'm not sure how much of a dent all this made in the slug population, but it sure made me feel better. Since you have kitties, Escar-Go! Slug & Snail Control is a slug bait made by Gardens Alive which is pet-safe. Don't know if that is the case with Sluggo since I do know that some slug baits aren't safe around small kids and animals. There are probably other pet-safe slug baits - this is the only one I know about. I have heard that crushed eggshells around particularly vulnerable plants is supposed to help keep out softbodied critters, but in my experience the birds remove the eggshells faster than I can eat eggs so I don't know if it actually works. Here is a link that might be useful: Escar-Go! Slug & Snail Control