Slugs. This time it's personal

Goldfish. (We'd rather have had a photograph of a slug but we couldn't find one.) Photograph: Laurence Dutton/Getty

What do slugs and goldfish have in common? The answer is not the punchline to some playground joke, but the animal welfare bill. The government has scrapped plans to ban the use of goldfish as fairground prizes. "A cabinet compromise now looks set to be agreed. This will still let children win their goldfish, but only if they are accompanied by someone over 16", according to today's Financial Times.

Slugs and snails, on the other hand, are to remain unprotected from the annihilation that threatens every time they venture within the arc of torchlight of the slightly-deranged gardener who has just found her painstakingly nurtured seedlings reduced to bare stalks as she patrols the garden at dusk. In other words, me.