Word: snailing
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Paleolithic man ate snails. So do modern Frenchmen. Every year thousands of them are plucked from trees, bushes, walls and the good soil of Burgundy, are pulled rudely out of their shells, boiled, dressed with garlic, stuffed back and served up sizzling hot on tin plates to be downed between gulps of rich red Chambertin. So delectable is the escargot that the best breeds of him are becoming scarce. To restrict snail-plucking, the Department Council of the Cote d'Or met lately at Dijon, soon found itself embroiled in a hopeless argument over the question of what...
Cried Councillor Jules Guichet: "But certainly the snail is game. One hunts it, does one not? The game warden is trying to escape his responsibility...
Councillor Andre Fabre suggested that the snail was a domestic animal. Other councillors promptly objected that domestic snails had already deteriorated from inbreeding.* Only the wild herds needed protection...
Councillor Henri Espadrille (consulting a dictionary): "The snail is a castropod mollusk, or shellfish (which are not fish), like the whelk, the slug, the mussel, the limpet, the oyster. Messieurs, we can regulate the snail as seafood, for he is really an oyster...
...desperation the council called in Maitre Jevain, prominent attorney of Dijon. After much thought Maitre Jevain opined as follows: "The Government lists a category of domestic animals under the generic title of horned beasts. Does not the snail conform to that definition...