Charles L. Stewart’s religious practices are a bit strange. He claims that, as part of his religion, he had to illegally import a dangerously invasive species of Giant African Snail so as to protect his followers from illnesses. Stewart, from Hialeah, Florida, maintains that drinking the mucus from living snails is a common practice to cure sickness in his religion Ifa Orisha, which is a traditional African religion often confused with Santeria. Drinking snail extract often made his sick followers violently ill, giving them strange lumps in their stomachs and severe weight loss.
Florida is home to a lot of invasive species like pythons and iguanas, but there’s nothing as dangerous as this snail. In the areas of Africa where it lives, it’s renowned for its devastation. It eats everything, and I do mean everything, from food crops to grass and even plaster and stucco. The snails have both male and female sex organs and can lay up to 1200 eggs a year. You can see how a few of these critters, which Stewart kept in his backyard in a box and fed lettuce, need to be kept under tight controls. Tighter than a 3×2 wooden crate, that is.
Tags: invasive species, cults, unusual religions, Hialeah, Florida, Charles L. Stewart, Giant African Snails, cult leader gets followers to drink snail juice, snail juice, disgusting drinks, Ifa Orisha, snail mucus, dangerous insects
