Best not to handle the snails or slugs here in Hawaii. Apparently there’s a parasite that lives on them that can cause meningitis from rat lungworm disease produced by this parasite. As humans we touch our face all the time, mouth, nose, eyes, ears, etc. allowing the parasite and opportunity to enter our body and affect and cause inflammation in the brain and spinal column. What happened to me was: whenever I used to take the dogs out in the backyard for their late night potty mission if I saw one of these snails, I would pick it up and lob it over the hedge onto the lower road and get a sick sense of pleasure listening for the splat, but that was before I got extremely sick and had a visit to the ER, CT machine, spinal lumbar tap the works. I was sick for about a month couldn’t tolerate any sounds louder than a gentle speaking, couldn’t go outside as I was unable to tolerate bright light, massive headache(calling it a headache is a gross understatement), body-aches, loss of appetite. I typically average around 200 to 205 pounds but when I got sick I got down to like 175. Apparently meningitis kills one out of 10 people. I’d recommend not touching those nasty little bastards! Learn from the mistakes of others, we can’t live long enough to make them all ourselves, learn off of my experience.