TTouch Therapy for snails

[slimeaddict]

Hi everyone,

Those who may have seen my website may know I'm an animal therapist working mainly with a form of therapy known as TTouch. TTouch - the Tellington TTouch - is a method based on circular movements of the fingers and hands all over the body. The intent of the TTouch is to activate the function of the cells and awaken cellular intelligence - a little like "turning on the electric lights of the body."

The TTouch is done on the entire body, and each circular TTouch is complete within itself. Therefore it is not necessary to understand anatomy to be successful in speeding up the healing of injuries or ailments, or changing undesirable habits or behavior.

Now, TTouch has been used on many different species from horses, dog, cats and birds to reptiles, leopards and even Keiko the killer whale from free Willy, and so recently I've been looking into how our snails can benefit from this work.

So far the results are amazing and it would seem that the absolutely love the circular TTouch movements, when compared to stroking the flesh of the snail it seems they do get pleasure. Rocket my confident Fulica has been seen to actually stretch her self up and out of her shell as if to present as much of herself as possible.

My Mega that can be a little shy has responded really well and now loves to be handled, recently coming on a workshop and meeting over 30 people and took it all in her stride. And seeing as it was a TTouch workshop and was getting TTouch all day she loved it! I now thinking this would be a really useful method for anyone with shy or wild caught snails.

With all the other species TTouch has been shown to not only increase seratonin levels in the brain but also to boost the immune system. So for those snails rescued from Brixton this method again may be useful.

Which brings me to the question... what do snails feel? I firmly believe they can experience pleasure - if they can feel pain then why not pleasure? Surly the fact that food preferences can vary so much between individuals of a species is proof enough that they must 'enjoy' some food and not others showing an ability to experience pleasure and to learn.

I'd love to hear everyone Else's experiences and views...

Adam

[kab]

im a firm believer that everything alive that can feel pain also has be capable of experiencing pleasure ,your theory really interests me
ive closely interacted with the snails since bringing back the rescues from brixton ,keeping snails is no longer a case of feeding watching and cleaning for me ,
one of the ones from the first batch i have become very very fond of and he particularly enjoys being handled and touched
yesterday i brought home six more , the first one to come out reached out his head after probably being without food or water for lord knows how long , you could see the pleasure as he stretched in the shower , so i touched him along the side of his body and he stretched even more he loved it , i intend to try it with all the others cos as daft as it might sound anything that might help them in their recovery im willing to do ,
and if they hated it im sure they would just go back into the shell
i was quite touched by it
karen

[mickysnail]

I belive that reiki healing is fantastic for any living thing! (I am a level1 reiki healer). you would be losing nothing by trying T-touch or reiki. mickysnail

[Val]

I don't know if snails can actually feel pain or even pleasure as we know it. It would be interesting to have others viewpoints on this.

Val

[Arno]

It's a difficult subject,one which even scientists don't agree about.But snails do have a simple nerve system(no central brain like us)so whether they can feel emotions is questionable.I don't know what make the snails in Adams case react like that.It would be interesting to see if other peoples snails react in a similar manner.
Two interesting links I found on this subject:
abcnews.go.com/Health/PainManagement/story?id=722163&page=1

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/14/tech/main673989.shtml

[mary]

well they have a short memory and they are used in medicine to know more about the lost of memory in humans.
So if they have memory, means that they retain some of the experience in their little brains. Maybe as the golden fish, just short duration but something is something ;D

I think as well that all organism (if not all the majority of them) must have some way to react to the environment. It is for they own survival.

About the lobster in the article, I don't know if they could have pain in boiling water, . If an human had an accident and fail into a boiling water pool, the body would suffer a shock of temperature in seconds that I don't think the person could experience any pain. However it is just an speculation, nobody has survived to this experience to tell us about it.

Voila other web sites about memory of snails and uses in science research

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1560388.stm

www.sussex.ac.uk/press_office/media/media478.shtml

[danikat]

Whilst some other scientists might disagree it seems fairly silly to me to say that any animal is incapable of feeling pain or pleasure, if they were then they'd be unable to avoid hardful or dangerous situations and wouldn't know to repeat actions that they benefitted from and evolution would wipe them out pretty quickly.

[(¯`·._.·[Samm]·._.·´¯)]

Surely snails have some sort of nerves?
When ther out of there shell and you touch them; what tells them to shoot back into there shell..hehe

[ness]

Of course snails and other animals can respond to both beneficial stimuli and harmful stimuli in an appropriate way. And snails have been shown to have memory in scientific studies, and I'm sure many snail keepers have noticed that snails will devlop patterns in their behaviour that vary from individual to individual.

The question is - is it pain/pleasure, or purely automatic? I would love to think that snails experience pleasure, they APPEAR to enjoy having showers, they seem to enjoy it when they mouth each other. My own snails wake, eat and explore. Do they enjoy exploring? When I put something new in their environment they often investigate.

But this could all be automatic. How much choice do they have in their reactions? Could the following be true?:
They sense food - they go to eat. They sense water - they go to bathe as evolution has taught them that water is beneficial. They respond positively to being mouthed, and/or T-Touched because this feels like a prelude to mating, which is essential to survival of the species, thus reacting positively.
Now this last point is an interesting one. I would have thought that mating is largly down to sensing chemical hormones in other sexually ready snails of the same species, thus the mating response begins. They start by mouthing each other for a while and it goes on from there. Why? Are they just finding the right position? It seems to be more than that. Are they confirming that they will indeed mate with each other? Perhaps a chemical stimulus by iteself is not enough - they need to find each other by touching each other and getting in the right positions, so perhaps the touch stimulus has developed from that to the point where they can't mate without it.

Snails mouth each other and respond either positively or neutrally no matter what age or species is touching the other. They also group together - again regardless of age and species. Snails appear to benefit from the company of other snails.

Do they enjoy this? Or is it all just automatic? Why would they seek the company of snails from different species? Surely they are competition for food and not of any benefit to the survival of their own species?

And how come snails develop different preferences? Snails of the same species will favour certain food, certain places of their enclosure, etc. Is this down to personality and the capacity of choice? Or have they learned slightly different things and are purely responding to their own memory?

I would love to hear that snails can feel pleasure. I would love to hear that they are intelligent enough to make simple choices, and that they truely do have their own personalities. But who knows?

[coyote]

Ness has raised some good points. T-touch was developed to use on mammal species, which are genetically programmed to respond positively to soothing, caressing touch. Since, unlike mammal babies, juvenile snails are capable of surviving independently from birth and don't need to be nurtured by their parents, I don't think snail species will have a genetic predisposition to responding to the kind of touch developed for T-touch. But I could be wrong, because there is so much we don't know about snails.

I think it's worth experimenting with. Although I'm having a hard time imaging doing T-touch on a little H. aspersa.

[slimeaddict]

I guess it's on of those questions we will never have an answer for, however I have used TTouch sucessfully with many reptiles with amazing results. It would be interesting to experiment with giving your snails different experiences i.e stroking them with a damp artist's paintbrush... making gentle circular movements with the rubber on the end of a pencil or even using a piece of sponge. It's all about seeing what snails enjoy, I'd be really interested to hear the responses others get from their snails.

Adam

[mickysnail]

Well, I don't know if it is my inagination but when I stroke my snail's shells using a circular motion it does bring them out. Reiki seems to be bringing my poorly Jack out of his shell too! mickysnail

[slimeaddict]

Excellent Micky snail! Try gently stroking the body of your snails too, using the same circular motion, they really seem to enjoy it! Thanks for giving it a go!!

Adam

[mickysnail]

I had read the book by Linda Tellington-Jones way before even had snails. I thought it was interesting then. The only touch that I can remember is the Leopard touch (I think) I will dig my book out again. I don't know if I have the technique right but the snails don't mind. mickysnail

[dmoore87]

im not sure if this thread is still alive but i was curious and searching on google regarding snails and memory and found this site. I recently moved to a new home in northern california and am amazed to find that since i have lived here, i have a snail (that i have marked with a small happy face with a sharpie) that keeps coming back to my front porch every night after the sprinklers turn on, and sit on an open pack of matches that i have been leaving out... This has been going on for roughly a month now... i know that snails have no brain, but i just find it curious that the same snail keeps returning every night to sit on a pack of matches that i have placed on my front porch. Can anyone explain this?

[coyote]

Hi dmoore, welcome to the forum. I can't explain why a snail would sit on a book of matches, but I think there is an explanation for why it returns to the same place. It's probably following a slime trail. The moisture from the sprinklers is what draws it out. I don't know why it would park itself on some matches, though, unless there's some element in them that it's absorbing through its foot.

Whether snails have a brain or not is debatable. Snails have a cerebral ganglion for processing sensory information from their tentacles. There are other ganglia in the body for processing other kinds of neural information from other parts of the body. Here's a rather technical page showing snail ganglia:
www.msu.edu/~atkinso9/brains.htm

It's an interesting observation you've made. Let us know how long the snail keeps returning. What part of northern California are you in? I'm just north of San Jose.