The Great Transfer - Slugs

When it rains around here, slugs and snails burst forth from all grassy areas and roam across the pavements, congregating on any dropped food or droppings which may have been left by us; gastropod Wombles, of sorts.

Unfortunately for the slugs and snails, no-one seems to pay much care to them and they get trodden on quite often, exploding like squidgey land mines. That's why, when I was walking back from a trip to the supermarket, I was walking amidst a horrific battlefield of mollusks versus humans, and there was only ever going to be one loser.

The humans.

No, no, I kid. I certainly wouldn't be letting the world know about some kind of mollusk massacre through a blog anyway, though there are some people who may actually consider the internet to be a sensible medium for such things.

Anyway, walking amidst the crushed corpses of slugs and snails, I wondered why they would actually break from their grassy cover; surely it only ever resulted in heavy casualties for relatively little gain? Now, I'm not expecting these things to be tactical masters in any respect, if they were then they would probably make nighttime sojourns to claim nutrients, right?, but I'm thinking that evolution would surely mean that those slugs who didn't get a size 10 hug were able to pass on these sensibilities to their offspring?

But I suppose that it's a way of controlling the slug population; they ensure that there is plenty of food to go around by putting in this instinct for the brash and the brainless to rush out into the pavements going "Wooo! Yeah! Fuck you other slugs, I'm in the pavement and I ru... *splat*." It would have to be a recessive gene in order to ensure that plenty of these creatures get the same instincts, but it would explain a lot.

Yes, this post is meant to be witty, but it also brings about an interesting allegory; what if our deep divisions and predilection to kill one another is the human version of a pavement dash?