My new flat coat retriever pup keeps eating snails. I am slightly worried because I wouldnt like to eat them raw!!
As a psychology student I have a little bit of useful imformation, its called Classical Conditioning and it means you allow your dog to be trained in order to achieve good behaviour or a reaction of some kind! If your puppy is eating snails, each time you catch them with one, shout "No" as a primary telling off. After this go out and collect about 5 snails cover them in bitter lemon juice or very hot chilli powder and lay them out on the ground in various places. Let your puppy find them and they'll soon realise they're not that nice after all!! As with all training you will have to persevere for at least a week but whats a week or 2 out of a lifetime of bringing snails in and being ill!!!

thanks for that i have a puppy who likes slugs :(

Please don't let your dogs eat slugs and snails ...they can cause heartworm ...something fairly uncommon in the UK at the moment but a growing problem

Heartworm in the UK

you many have noticed the sad face smilie ???? I don't LET her eat slugs ...but she would if i didn't watch her like a hawk...know all about heartworm but thanks anyway ....

Libby is a sod for bringing snails in :( I cant stand them anyway but when she pops out to the loo at night and its been raining , theres loads out there.
She crunches the shell and leaves the slimy yukky snail bit on the floor for me to pick up - yeeeukk

Interesting link though Melody - I wasnt aware of this

My reply was to Noolibell and not to your post Inca. You can tell by the position of the post ;) It would have been under yours and in to the right had I replied to your post :D

Have jsut read your link.  A Junior bitch that I bred was diagnosed with this, but thinking back at around 6 months she had a cough, which was treated as Kennel cough.  It was only when she started loosing weight after her spay at a year, and then being excersise intolerant (not normal for the hardy Elkhound with stamina in spades), that I told them to get blood tests as this wasn't normal.  they mentioned the snail eating quite by accident to the vet who immiediately then suspected this, though blood tests were inconclusive (vet thinks low grade infection).  After dosing with Panacur she steadily improved.

Unfortunately dogs do not read psychology books. :-)   If that wasn't bad enough, they have extremely acute sense of smells and can readily detect a snail with added seasoning from a plain snail.  They detect the smell from a distance too far away for you to even see the snail.  Unless you can find every snail or slug in garden and season them all, or have a dog with a greatly diminished sense of smell, this method is not very likely to work.  

Net: You can teach a dog to avoid snails with a flavour it does not like.  You can teach a dog not to eat a plain snail while you are watching, assuming your "no" is a stronger negative reinforcement than the positive reinforcement of a tastey snack of escargot.  However, they will continue to eat them when you are not looking.  This is called "normal dog".  :-)

Stacey

Also let us not forget, some prefer the addition of condiments :D :D :D

Yep, Millie doesn't need any encouragement to eat snails, but adding something hot and spicey would just make her even keener!

no probs Mel  ;)

I'm sure the traditional garlic butter would go over exceptionally well

Hamish LOVES snails from the pond.

My puppy loves snails and slugs too could there possibly be a reason why so many dogs like to eat them?...Is there something good that they think they are getting?...or is it just because they like to eat gross things?...it is horrible when you have to pick up a half eaten snail with broken shell from inside the house...lol...it doesn't bear thinking some of the things they want to eat...

I couldn't belive last week my puppy stole my mums pop sock type things and I calmly went to retrive them so as not to make her run away with them even further but before I was even close rather them let me have them back she swallowed them I couldn't belive she could do that without choking I still can't belive the ease in which she downed them.  I was worried to death and thought it was going to be the end of her :( but alas I watched her very careful the next day and she produced said pop socks from the other end the next day...it is a miricale how that happened gross for sure but amazing she didn't have more trouble with them, although she was a little off her food and slightly miserable looking until they passed.  I was so relived and so was she!

The other thing although not deadly but it bothers me none the less is when I take my pup (Keena) for walks on the beach she sniffs out every single damn crab in the area and proceeds to try and scoff the lot and it is impossible to get them all from her sometimes...I don't want to have to put her on the leash or muzzle her but her eating so many of the crabs bothers me.  I picked one up (dead already!) to experiment how sharp the shell is etc when broken down and that wasn't to bad in it's self, but the legs on the smaller crabs have such sharp claws on that I am worried if she does eat the claw bit and I am asuming she does becasue she is not picky! but I am worried that the claws my scratch her all up inside?  Some people who's dogs do the same laugh it off and say it's roughage and some say it can only be bad.  Hell I don't know.  I would just avoid the beach all together but it is the main area to walk a dog in my town as it is a small town with hardly no open grassy areas for her to play.  I would drive out of town to the woods too but she gets so car sick within minuets and we are working on that! (Probably all the stupid crabs and things she eats don't help!) 

I think she may grow out of all the bad eating habbits because she is just one of those pups who has had them all, from eating cat and cattle poop etc (although never dog poop, so she is slightly fussy!) to eating stones and all kinds.  She has gone off cat poop now at least but cattle crap is still tasty apparently...lol.  I like to think I feed her a balanced diet and give her all she needs so it isn't that she is nutrient deficient, but sometimes it seems she would just rather eat these things instead of what I put in her bowl :(  We will get over it though :) I hope!

If we dont watch our wheten Rosie, she will pick them up and bring them in and put them in her bed. And in the morning there is always a snail on the wall... Ugh!!!
Cause she never eats them, i think she would earn millions of euros in France. :D

sarah xxxx

Crabs - there is really only a need to worry about the sort you may catch...................

not the sort you can eat

lol...but seriously tohme do you think that eating these crabs from the BEACH! are not going to be a problem, it would be great if that is the case because I do worry! Those claws are so sharp but maybe she spits those out?! ya right!

She wasn't so intreased in those damn crabs today mainly because there was a lovely big dead seagul washed up which stole her attention..Great!...She saw it earlier today and attempted to put her shoulder to the ground and I knew what was going to follow, her rolling all over it...lol...but I caught her first and got her to leave it then I'll be darned if tonight she didn't hunt that damn thing down and rolled on it before I got to it.  When I got over there she promptly stopped rolling and tried to take off running with it by dragging it by it's wing...gross!...I love my puppy *sigh*...lol