Anyhow. I have limited experience with fish, other than having had fish and chips (mostly chips) as a kid a couple of times.
I don't like fish. They creep me out. Even when I ate meat, I didn't eat them, and they are the main reason I don't swim in rivers or oceans, but prefer pools.
I also don't understand why people have pet fish. The terms "pet fish" are, in fact, an oxymoron. No offense if you have a pet fish; I just don't covet it.
My brother N briefly (very briefly) had pet fish. He bought a bag of goldfish on a whim at the grocery store. I kid you not. Along with the gum, bandaids, and tabloids, the store had a bag of goldfish for sale, and he bought them.
He named them Pedro, Gunther, and Sebastian (I think. Memory fades, but I know Gunther for sure.) He took them back to his dorm and promptly forgot that they needed to eat every once in awhile.
One afternoon he got back from class and couldn't find Pedro. He wasn't floating dead in the bowl; he hadn't hopped out onto the desk. N came to the awful conclusion that he was such a bad fish parent that Gunther and Sebastian had, out of their minds with hunger, ganged up on Pedro and eaten him.
He felt terrible (or so he said - I'm not sure how terrible you can feel if you have basically caused goldfish cannibalism), and remembered to feed them for a little while... and then...
Yes, you guessed it. Gunther bit the dust. Or rather, Sebastian ate him.
N felt terrible again (or so he said. You'd think that someone who knows he's forgetful wouldn't charge himself with feeding a pet that couldn't vocally remind him, but I guess he forgot.)
And sure enough, after awhile, he forgot to feed Sebastian. And one day, he came home from class and Sebastian was an ex-Sebastian, floating in the bowl.
Since then, his experience with fish has been limited to the times that they encounter his plate.
18 comments:
I don't understand the appeal of fish either. To eat or have as a pet. My younger daughter wanted fish but wasn't prepared to look after them, so guess who got the job? They didn't live long.
The smaller portion wanted either a fish tank or to keep a snake in a fish tank.
You will be shocked and surprised to hear we have a fish tank. Which is a LOT of work. And fish get truly disgusting diseases. Which I won't discuss.
Owning a pet fish is a lesson in death. I have had aquariums but they never live long no matter how well you take care of them.
I had pet fish but only because someone gave me a fish bowl that hung on the walk with a frame around it. A picture frame fish bowl. It was so cool and I could watch my fish named Popeye slowly die as if he were on television.
When I was married, we had an aquarium - he insisted on it. I hated having to deal with it, and had to because he was on the road for work so much. So I don't get it either.
There was a craze around this area several years ago, in which they were making plant arrangements in a glass vase and putting a Siamese fighting fish in it to swim around in the vase water. One of my coworkers was taking one home one day and I said, "Don't you have a cat?" She said, "Oh she won't bother it." And when she came in the next day, she said she had put the vase with the plant and fish in the middle of the dining room table and then went out again. When she came home, the vase was tipped over, water all over, plants strewn around and no fish in sight. One of the few times I was unhappy to be right. Yep - the cat got the fish.
In my experience, even well fed fish will eat each other if they can...
I'm afraid I don't get it either. I think fish in the Ocean can be Gorgeous---but, I have never understood the idea of Fish as Pets. I know lots of people have them and they become very attached to them....I guess I need to cuddle with a pet, and Fish don't seem very cuddly to me...!
We have some fish here, and for the longest time I was the de-facto owner.
Now, I'm not.
We still have the fish, but now they're not responsibility anymore.
I have two fish, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, who we've had for ages. Their greatest appeal seems to be utterly confusing our cats!
I don't get the allure of fish ownership either. They don't tend to last very long even when they are fed regularly and mourning something that gets flushed down a toilet just seems wrong.
It's a fish-eat-fish world out there.
WE had Chinese food today and studied the fish ponds.
Ha! That story was both sad and hilarious. I don't understand fish either. "Here's my pet that I can't interact with in any way. Also, it can't tell me it's hungry, so when I invariably forget to feed it, it's going to end up like your story."
Our differences are what makes the world go 'round! Some people keep fish because they can't have any other kind of pets. Sometimes it's just because they are pretty to look at. Often you will see them at a dentist or doctors office because watching them swim around is supposed to help people relax. I gather some of you out there would not be relaxed at all! I kept goldfish as a little kid and then had a 20 gallon aquarium for a few years as an adult. I gave them away because they started to get too big, like 4 inches long and it kind of grossed me out to handle them. So I can relate a little to your feeling about fish. Other wise I love eating fish and chips. We live in the walleye (fish) state after all!
Fish story.
At work, there's an aquarium in the reception that I see everyday.
I had a goldfishes that I won in the school fair multiple years in a row, so growing up I usually had goldfishes.
I named one of them Curious George because he used to swim around this plastic tree I kept in the bowl. I was in elementary school. One night my mother went into the kitchen and looked into the sink, and there was George. He got so curious he jumped into the sink. Apparently she screamed. A burial at sea was conducted in the middle of the night. I didn't hear it but I found out George was gone the next morning.
I had a pet fish once...he, amongst the others that he, the last one standing or swimming ate along the way was named "Armadeus" as in Mozart.
Every time I arrived home from work he would swim up to the wall of the tank as if in greeting; and as strange as this will seem to you, and it did even to me at the time...I shed a tear when I came home from work one evening to find him dead. I'd grown very attached to Armadeus.
Sounds like he learned the same lesson about fish as I did: fish have really, really, really short miserable lives.
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