I think the animal cruelty was in reference to the tank size and conditions.
Actually, I had no idea; I reacted to your first paragraph without reading further. So you were the preaching vegan I mocked in my second paragraph after all. Did you really think you weren’t getting in anybody’s face? Knock it off.
Or vice versa.
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Humans bear the responsibility when animals are kept in captivity. It’s not a natural situation at all, any fish tank can be literally referred to as an artificial environment.
I suspect the only “god” involved here is the god of clickbait videos, which too many of us worship daily.
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Done for the film, poor description, should not be here.
This is death for amusement, and is not acceptable
Wait, what? This paragraph?
“Not exactly a fair parallel to the city kid/country kid scenario, as what we have here is two animals in far too small a cage for the express purpose of having one eat the other recorded on video for other people to vicariously enjoy.”
It wasn’t the fish eating the other fish that I was reacting to — that’s fine with me.
It was the video being posted for, as far as I could tell, a set-up of watching two fish in a bare tank, one eating the other, with no reference as to why — like to show how one feeds a big fish.
Honestly, I don’t see how commenting on a video of one fish eating another is advocating veganism. Where did I tell people why they should never eat meat?
Anyway, I’m sorry if I came off preachy. It wasn’t my intent.
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Two years ago a buddy built a pond in his back yard and had a few large goldfish. He spent the first winter chopping holes in the top ice to keep the pond oxygenated. They made it through the winter and grew to a large size.
One day he grabbed coffee, and went out on his back deck to see a heron standing in the pond. He never restocked the pond.
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Tank is too small, probably 1/4 the size that catfish needs at a minimum. It looks like one of those, “Hey see what this fish can gobble down” videos, Presumably the goldfish was tossed in just to get the video. The algae eater (gyrinocheilos ?) is probably just there in a misguided attempt at keeping the tank clean and will likely starve to death before the catfish is done digesting the goldfish.
I worked at/held the key for a pet store when I was in college and the owner actually told us we weren’t to sell people fish that were likely to outgrow the tank they were going into. You’d be surprised at the number of folks who didn’t believe that a goldfish can grow a foot long and live decades if you don’t keep it in a jar…
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OMG! I’m not that far from a city river with herons…now, I really want to have a pond! I didn’t see the point of just having fish…but to have HERONS striding around in the backyard!
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If you feed them, they will come.
Long, long ago, my dad (a botanist and wetland scientist) turned a disused sandlot in our country house backyard into a wetland - diverted a spring to fill it with water, excavated the middle and made a dike around the edges, planted it with wetland plants. It lacked frogs, so we went out one foggy spring night when the frogs were all crossing the road in search of compatible mates, caught a bunch of them, and liberated them in our little backyard wetland. The frogs made themselves at home and laid lots of tadpole eggs. Soon enough we had creatures hanging around out back specifically for the free frog buffet.
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I’d be thrilled just to hear them making a racket on hot summer nights!
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Points for using that abomination of a movie for something of value!
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OH man, he lost a couple that way. Added a netting over it. Just talked to him today and he has to go fish out a turtle that got in there.
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Another frog related story from long ago. My father ran a wetland plant nursery. In addition to a greenhouse, he had some artificial ponds - square sided concrete pits half full of water, used for growing marsh plants that only thrive when fully submerged. One summer, I spent an hour or so with him fishing snapping turtles out of the concrete ponds. They would go into the pools in pursuit of the frogs that lived there. But unlike the frogs, they were not able to jump back out, so they were trapped. The presence of frog body parts in the water would alert us that somewhere in amongst the reeds and water lilies lurked a bad tempered reptile that could bite your finger clean off. Once we found it, we had to lift it out and carry it to the nearby stream. The smaller ones you could put a shovel under them and lift, then carry them on the shovel blade to the stream. The bigger ones… well, figuring out how to carry a big ass heavy turtle with a 15 or 18 inch diameter shell in a way that prevented it from tearing giant gouges (or worse) in my hands or arms with its claws or beak was a rather tricky geometric puzzle.
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Totally. Chickens are total assholes to each other, and roosters are assholes to everything.
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My favourite story…
We live in the country. My very good friend has a husband who used to work away a lot. One time, they had a scrappy fight that ended when he went off to work. She was still pissed. Then, standing at the kitchen window the day after he left, she saw a beautiful heron statue in the pond. ‘Oh!’ she thought. "He bought me this beautiful statue, and I bitched him out about something stupid!’
Then, the heron statue bent its neck, lightning-fast, and ate the last koi…
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It’s amazing here - you can’t talk on the phone outside in spring for the racket. Particularly awesome is the 3-am moment when they’re in full song, then … silence. Something walked by. Then, boom. Back at it.
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always have to be careful with large fish.
Or small, really mean fish. I bought a baby gar about 3 inches long. I came home to find him with his jaw blown out and my gourami missing in action. I had really thought the gourami’s size would protect him. The gar died.
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And also at @strangefriendbb :
In the same way that two dogs fighting each other is cruelty.
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How very cruel to keep fishes in such a barren tank, and to house incompatible species in it. This publication tries to present this as being humorous but there is nothing funny about cruelty.
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