Flesh-eating slug repellent

[David]

No: HPFGUIDX 47382

Richard wrote (about why flesh-eating slugs would be eating cabbage):

> Strangely enough, I've always read it as the Repellent being flesh-
eating, 
> not the slugs, i.e. the product is a flesh-eating repellent for 
slugs. It's 
> only on reading this thread that I've realised that the name could 
mean 
> repellent for flesh-eating slugs.
> 
> In my reading, there is of course no problem. :-)

Yes, that was my reading too.  *However*, it could be:

- flesh-eating slugs only *really* become a menace after they have 
become angry and malnourished after eating a diet of rabbit-food, and 
Dumbledore has forbidden Hagrid from pacifying them by feeding them 
Mrs Norris;

- they are called flesh-eating slugs because normally they eat flesh, 
but what they really like is a nice tender cabbage.  Hagrid, 
naturally, isn't bothered as long as only a few students are at risk 
and anyway, that's not his department; however, once his cabbages are 
threatened he gets serious;

- Hagrid's cabbages are special.  They require a regular diet of red 
meat to achieve their full potential.  The flesh-eating slugs are 
competing, and have to go;

- he is hoping, by strategic placement of the repellant, to drive the 
slugs in the direction of Mrs Norris, whose skeleton will be found 
mysteriously picked bare, and the connection with Hagrid will never 
be traced.

David, who would like to know (offlist, I think) the basis for 
believing JKR is 'explaining more details to the studio than we ever 
get from her books'.