Heck no, I wouldn’t be tipping the acid down any pipes. Not only bad for your pipes but where it ends up too.

I know this is a super old post but just in case you see it I wanted to say that it’s not always very easy to tell if the shell has a creature inside. They can bury themselves deep inside easily. Once I had a bag of shells and went back to sit in the car to look at Google maps before going to my next spot when I actually heard clinking in my bag and noticed it moving! I looked inside to find a couple of my shells were alive. Once it sat still, the snail felt safe to try to come out and move around. Thankfully I was still in the parking lot so I promptly got out went back over to the beach and let the Little guys go back in the water. all that to say that of course anyone should check carefully, but it is possible to accidentally take live ones, especially for new shellers. I also figured out that tea tiny crabs can live inside sponges or at least hide out in them for a while so I don’t take those anymore either because once a baby crab crawled out into the sink and freaked me out as well as feeling Bad that I took him from his home. I tried to bring him back to the beach next day but it was too late because he had been in the freshwater of the bathroom sink🤷‍♀️ … i’ve also had people try to tell me that they never have shells that smell bad and that there must be something alive if they smelled bad, but as we can see from the mini comments here that’s not always the case either. There could be bits of the animal stuck way back in the shell and it doesn’t mean that it was alive. So even the lady who posted about this could be mistaken in that her shells maybe weren’t alive but still had dead snail in them. I have seen dried out shells on Keewayden with the entire snail dried up inside so that happens too.