My issue is with the size of the feeder. That gulper’s stomach is seriously distended. It’s dinner is actively struggling and likely will be for some time. My suspicion that things may not end well for our predator seems to be confirmed:
…gulper cats can eat creatures half as large as themselves, and while they cannot eat creatures their own size or larger, they will often still try! This can lead to at least one dead fish, and sometimes two…
Making this video nothing more than some tuber rolling the dice with a captive animal’s life, camera filming as he feeds it bigger and bigger meals just to increase the shock value (number of views) of his latest upload.
I get that reaction, but if one is keeping catfish one has to feed them something. this time they filmed feeding and the only startling aspect is how large of fish a gulper catfish will eat in comparison to itself. they could have fed it 4 or 5 smaller fish.
it is a f’n fish eat fish world out there my friend. i wish nature weren’t so damn harsh sometimes…
many animals will only eat live prey, just like the do in nature. i felt sorry for the goldfish for sure, but a gulper catfish can put down an entire pond of koi in a season by itself they are basically nature’s eating machines. little catfish don’t get a free pass.
i think what triggers the most empathy is that it is a small closed tank with no place to hide. basically this is dinner. that seems unfair to my sense of fairness i want the koi to have a fighting chance, go underdog and all of that, but nature sure doesn’t work that way so i wonder why i feel any difference about witnessing something that nature would have zero qualms about throwing down. i guess that’s empathy for ya. nature is the worst at animal cruelty, it is responsible for 100% of it, even us, yep we are animals doing what animals do.
No, this is feeding time. have you never even seen a pet store? have to feed the fish regularly. it seems unfair to us that the koi doesn’t get some sort of fighting chance to win its freedom to the great big blue or whatever nonsense, but almost no one who is feeding a pet makes it intentionally hard for them to eat their dinner.
I’m quite surprised people here haven’t owned pets that required live feeding. personally i find live rodents to snakes harder than fish to fish. many pet stores sell baby male rats and mice as feeders for piranha and snakes. i feel much more for mammals than koi. in nature it is much much worse.
A. Just because a pet store does it, doesn’t mean it isn’t animal cruelty (in fact many pet stores are horrible to the animals in them).
B. This isn’t about fairness for the animal being eaten. The tank is too small. I have never seen anyone advocate moving fish around (which is stressful for them) to feed them. So it seems as if this is where the fish are being kept (animal cruelty) or, more likely, this was a specific setup to force the one fish to eat a fish larger than it normally would (see point C)
C. It is not normal to feed such a large fish to a predatory fish. It is dangerous for the predatory fish. You even say “they could have fed it 4 or 5 smaller fish” (which is the norm in my experience).
D. I haven’t seen it yet, but some apologist may say this happened while a tank was being cleaned, but it is unlikely that a camera would be setup in that case, so I call bullshit on that in advance.
Giving them live prey is kind of a niche; tolerating their enthusiastic acquisition (perhaps with a perfunctory “aww, fluffy, I didn’t want to step in that; but thanks”) seems to be ubiquitous.
Wow, I wonder how the black cat paid off the birds?
Ours are pretty quiet - we’ve got a long term resident Great Blue (Ardea herodias herodias*), and sometimes one of the white morph (Ardea herodias occidentalis) visits for a summer, plus occasional night herons and vagrant egrets.
Kingfishers, though, they make a loud but charming hullaballoo as they fly upstream.
*Ardea herodias herodias literally means “heron heron heron”. Literally.
I don’t think you need to feel sorry, since you did not come off as preachy by merely mentioning to someone that you’re a vegan. As so often happens, someone with the stereotype in their head that “vegans are so preachy!” encountered a vegan and interpreted what that person said – pretty much no matter what that person said – as preachy.
Many meateaters interpret other people’s choice not to eat meat as automatically an attack on their own choice to eat it. Some also feel guilty at some level and lash out as a defense mechanism. I’m sure others who do so have other reasons.
Anyway, just because some people interpret the mere mention of one’s veganism as “preachy” doesn’t mean that one should wither up and stay in the vegan closet.
Completely different. Especially if your fish or pet eat live food, like reptiles, snakes, and tarantulas do. Are you going to say a boa eating a mouse or a lizard eating live crickets is the same as dog fighting?
A. <= duh i know, the point was that this was one of the least cruel live feedings possible. Have you ever had to feed a live animal to another animal in real life? How could a live feeding possibly be less cruel that this?
B. <= That tank was 100% a transfer tank from the setup no one could think otherwise. Anyone who has had an aquarium will look at those tubes and know immediately what it was.
C. <= Not with gulper catfish who can eat fish larger than themselves. That koi was well within the safe range for feeding a gulper and well well within its natural food size range. You aren’t familiar with gulpers. Gulpers stomachs are intended to expand and hold such large prey. It is what they do. Black Swallowers eat fish 10x their size. Know your nature before making incorrect assumptions.
D. <= apologist? lol. you mean people with a different opinion about it?
Have you ever had to feed a live animal to another animal in real life?
From your words it seems a fairly clear no…
you seem unfamiliar with how most people feed pets that require live feeding.
This was one of the least cruel live feedings of any animal to any other animal possible other than our human misguided sense of fairness for the prey, but it is seldom fair for prey. that is nature in a nutshell. This was one of the cleanest least cruel eats possible, some fish rip their prey to shreds while alive.
With all the misguided idiots on the internet, i’m sure the poster of this video, wish they hadn’t.
I have full veterinarian training and volunteer those services at the local SPCA regularly.
I know cruelty to animals and what actual animal cruelty looks like.
I’m not going to misguidedly white knight some gold fish.
Depends, are you feeding the snake one mouse slightly dazed? or are you riling up the snake and the mice and putting a bunch in to watch them fight? In this case the fish are in too small of an aquarium (a stressor) and the fish that was eaten was too large (they should only be half the size of a gulper). I think this is closer to a dog fight than a feeding.
And that is ignoring the general advice online to avoid live feeding fish because of the dangers of parasites and disease (because breeder fish aren’t generally taken care of well).
If that tank is in the dimly lit corner of some type of “lab”, well I’m pretty sure that’s the start to a few grade “B” sci-fi / horror movies… Especially if the next scene involves a long still shot of the tank with one of the turtles swimming into view and ramming the glass so hard it cracks.
Where we live, we have a lot of… wildlife. Herons occasionally, but more often snakes, opossums, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, etc.
A few years ago, a neighbor who put in a courtyard fountain/pond had stocked it with a few dozen large goldfish that grew reliably larger for several years. One or more raccoons came in a single night and dragged just about every fish out of the water, leaving them all over the paved courtyard.
Each fish had–at most–one bite taken out of it.
The frogs moved in, to fill the vacuum that Nature abhors.
And that’s when the snakes showed up to eat those…
I think that pond is not getting much restocking these days.
Yup! They love to strip unripe corn out of a L-A-R-G-E patch of a cornfield, eat ONE bite, and toss it aside…as if the next ear will taste any differently.
They were expecting a more expensive variety of fish. “Pardon me, garconne, but has the chef purchased anything special I should know about?”
Sheesh this is such classic jerk behavior, and yeah I admit I am anthropomorphizing but hey if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a damn duck.
It’s worth mentioning that in addition to eating corn (which raccoons are famous for) and fish, I should add raccoons are really fond of eating chickens.
Different neighbor, down the road, keeps chickens and sells eggs. She wakes up to find a racoon having pulled pieces of her flock fistful-by-fistful, limb-from-limb, through the poultry netting (aka chicken wire)
and the scene (which I am glad I did not witness) was pretty gruesome because one of the stronger raccoons had pulled the netting away from the coop frame. He or she got it and it must have been mayhem.
All the chickens were slaughtered. My neighbor said about half of them only had one bite taken out of their chicken-y carcasses.
So I keep wondering, based on how wasteful raccoons seem to be while feeding, what evolutionary purpose is being served by this behavior. Corn, chickens, fish… why the killing spree, the wasteful bingeing? What’s the advantageous angle I am failing to see here?
The Cruelty isn’t in one fish eating another. It’s in placing two incompatible fish together in a way that’s going to end badly for simple shock/amusement value.
The tank is too small for either of the two large fish alone. Moving a large fish to a small tank simply to feed it is stressful to the fish and can result in injury or stress related infection.
This isn’t something “nature would throw down” In nature those fish don’t coexist. One is Asian, the other South American. If they did, they would inhabit completely different portions of the water column.
If you are going to feed the catfish feeder fish rather than the readily available pellet food, they should be sized appropriately so that the catfish can swallow them, and the baitfish will die quickly.
For the record I ran a pet store. I’ve got some not so amusing stories about folks who tried to feed live rodents to snakes that were too small…
