On 4 August 2021, a Hong Kong citizen found three snails sprinkled with a large amount of salt to death near Tsim Sha Tsui, and then the Animal Crime Police Team of the Yau Tsim Police District of Hong Kong took the initiative to launch an investigation and arrested a 26-year-old man suspected of cruelty to animals on August 16.
According to reports, this is a Doctoral Student of PolyU from the Mainland. He was suspected of spilling salt to kill 3 snails in the case.
The Hong Kong police stressed that they attach great importance to cases of cruelty to animals, and according to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Ordinance (Cap. 169), any person who treats animals cruelly causes unnecessary suffering to be punished with a maximum penalty of $200,000 and imprisonment for 3 years upon conviction.
It was found that the man killed the African giant snail, which is a notorious invasive alien species. African large snails reproduce quickly, laying 30 to 700 eggs at a time, harming more than 500 crops and being intermediate hosts for a variety of parasites and pathogens.
During the salt sprinkling process, passers-by accused him of explaining that because snails endangered the environment, they had to be eliminated, but in any case, they violated Hong Kong law.
Hong Kong's Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Ordinance prohibits the punishment and cruelty of animals. The animals here include "any mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish, any other vertebrate or invertebrate, whether wild or domesticated." ”
Acts that are prohibited and punished are mainly acts that cause or permit animals to suffer unnecessary or avoidable suffering. Specific examples are "cruel beating, kicking, bad treatment, excessive riding, excessive driving"; "Cruelly overburdening or cruelly torturing, provoking or frightening animals" and so on.
So is it illegal to kill African giant snails with salt?
The legitimacy of killing large snails depends at least on answers to two questions.
First, does a large snail feel pain?
Biological studies have shown that the neural nodules of snails are extremely simple, do not have the ability to perceive pain, and do not have expectations or visions for future life. Killing snails does not increase worldly suffering.
Second, assuming that the large snail perceives pain, is it not allowed to kill it?
Not necessarily. Scientific studies have shown that the large snail is a pest: first, it has a large amount of food, fast growth rate, strong fertility and long lifespan" and is extremely harmful to crops and also destroys the structure of the food web and biodiversity;
Second, it is the intermediate host of many pathogens (such as nematodes, flukes), and the probability of infecting people is very high;
Therefore, the act of killing a large snail in a way that minimizes suffering obviously promotes the minimization of suffering, and is morally correct. But whether salt sprinkling is the way to minimize suffering is the focus of this case, which in the judge's view is rather inhumane.
Because after the snail is sprinkled with salt, the mucus on the surface of the snail's body is sucked dry by a large amount of salt, which will cause its body to shrink and quickly dehydrate and die.
In this way, the act of killing a large snail is wrong, not only immoral, but also illegal. What do you think?
