Chris Packham: learning to love slugs will help garden wildlife bloom

The naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham has advised the nation to encourage the ecosystem of their gardens by ceasing to kill slugs.

Extolling the virtues of tolerance, Packham said “draconian choices” like “I don’t want slugs and snails to eat my plants” puts the gardener at risk of losing other wildlife such as hedgehogs, slowworms and song thrushes.

“That’s a tragic loss to the garden,” the BBC Springwatch presenter told the Radio Times magazine. “The song of the thrush is the closest you’re going to get to a nightingale in the 21st-century British garden.

“The slug’s been offered a free banquet. You have to expect it to eat it. If you’re planting a row of lettuce, you’re planting a free supermarket for molluscs. If you turned up at Sainsbury’s and they said: ‘Everything today is free’, you’d fill your basket, wouldn’t you?

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“That’s what humans would do. So put yourself in the mind of the slug. You have to find a degree of tolerance, find ways of managing slugs without killing them.”

Packham also suggests gardeners cut a hole in their fence to let hedgehogs walk through safely and put a bell on their cat’s collar to warn wildlife the cat is on the prowl.

Recently, Packham was cleared of two counts of assault in Malta after confronting hunters who had trapped wild birds.

A Maltese magistrate dismissed the case against him after he produced video evidence in court that showed he was jostled by a hunter while filming an interview about the illegal slaughter of birds on the island.

Speaking to the Guardian at the time, Packham said he was not going to press charges against the police or the hunter “because we’ve got better things to be doing. At the moment there are a lot of embarrassed police officers and hunters.”