Our snails and their well-being

Our harvest, exclusively manual, is the least invasive for the animal. But let's face it, it remains obvious that we come to disturb the animal in its natural cycle.

So the basic principle is to disturb him as little as possible, bringing him as little stress as possible. Snails for mucus harvesting are large breeders whose mission is to reproduce every year. (This agricultural activity is that of heliciculture and is independent of Mademoiselle Agathe)

These large breeders do not enter the food cycle and will therefore end their days naturally (a snail in the wild has a lifespan of 1 to 2 years, mainly due to the many predators and phyto treatments in the gardens, whereas in our breeding in organic farming they live rather up to 4 or 5 years).

For the collection of mucus strictly speaking, it is immediately after spawning, when its mucus is the richest in protein, and when it no longer needs it for its reproduction, that we carry out harvesting the slime by hand, snail by snail.

How can we be sure that we are not hurting them? Our snail farmer conducted tests for more than 4 years on their reproduction rate after the slime was harvested before embarking on our partnership. He was able to notice that snails that had been stimulated to harvest slime (a stimulation of 30 to 40 seconds once a year) and those that had not been stimulated showed no difference in their fecundity and spawning rates.

Thanks to these results, we were able to ensure that this stimulation did not disturb the snail too much in its life cycle. And it is essentially due to the dexterity that only the human hand can give and also for the ease of removing those who do not want to give, that this manual harvest is in our opinion the most respectful way to take advantage of the benefits of the drool. snail for the skin. And of course in "remove" we mean "rest the snail in the parks" to return to its primary activity: its natural cycle of reproduction.

Unfortunately, we cannot say that we do not disturb the animal despite everything. But, because there is always a "but" in terms of animal exploitation, such as the beekeeper who harvests honey, or the milk of donkeys also harvested for cosmetics, all these breedings do not have as their end the death of the animal. Moreover, if the exploitation made of the animal is the most respectful and ethical possible, we quickly notice that the quality of the elements obtained is much better.