I was reading some of the other posts here and my salting slugs as a kid pales in comparison.

But we did more than that. We had friends visiting from out of the region and had never seen slugs before. So we kind of went on a slug massacre. Salt. Baseball bats. And firecrackers. The friends' family had picked up firecrackers on the way to my family's place and when we got tired of salt and bats, fireworks seemed like a logical next step.

If you flip a slug over, and press something against its belly, it will reflexively curl its body around that object if the object is small enough to do so. Which firecrackers are.

We took a bunch of slugs and used a tree stump as a sort of sacrificial altar for the slugs, letting them wrap themselves around the thing that would blow them apart a moment later.

Fast forward ten minutes and a dozen dead slugs later, the tree stump is covered in colorful flecks of firecracker paper and slug parts. Our friend's dad comes out on the deck and looks down at us. My friend is poking a piece of slug meat with a stick. This is what prompted his dad to ask him if we were being cruel.