slug and snail deterrent
Theladygardens@aol.com (Sat, 18 Sep 2010 12:19:48 PDT)

If you are into backyard poultry, or even birds, I don't recommend using
Sluggo. A few years ago 3 of my large chickens pecked into an unopened bag
of sluggo right beside me. They ate away for a few minutes before I
noticed what they were doing. One died that day, the second died three days
later and the third died three weeks later after suffering horribly.
Comparing their size and how much they could have eaten in that short amount of
time, I'm guessing a bird wouldn't have to eat much at all to die from it.
If you read the directions on the bag, it does not say scatter liberally
which is what most of us do when we are furious about snails and slugs eating
our prized plants. It says to use it sparingly.
It's just like spraying for one pest and wondering why you don't have any
bees or butterflies in your garden any more.
My husband is a beekeeper. I react strongly to bee stings so to keep me
from weeding in front of his hives he placed clean carpet scraps in front of
them to keep the weeds down. On the days when the neighbors have a pest
truck spraying their property we find 400 - 700 dead bees on the carpet in
the evening. We would never have noticed this if we had left the area in
dirt and weeds. So my unscientific opinion is that colony collapse disorder
is caused by several things including most people randomly spraying toxins
to get rid of one thing but harming lots of other things in the process.
Carolyn