# Fish abuse



## Capistrono (Apr 12, 2010)

I hate people who get a fish and think that just because it's a fish, it doesn't need special care.
I hate people who get a pet, do ZERO research before hand and only believe the things the pet store employees tell them.

Someone I know just got two black goldfish, is keeping them in a 10 gallon tank (disregarded everything I said when I tried to tell her she needed a bigger tank) and plans on breeding them. 

I know next to nothing about black goldfish, I just did a google search for 15 minutes. She also proudly told me she kept her angelfish alive for 2 years. She bred them as well and lost almost every baby.


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## ohmyhi (Jun 18, 2013)

Those poor angelfish  and trust me I know the feeling!! Currently my roommate has a betta is a container that is not fit. Nothing to entertain him nor a heater to keep him warm. They need 78-80 degree water and our dorm is about 71 and water is usually 4-8 degrees below the room temperature  


I do hope those goldfish do not suffer and I wish people didn't let their lack of sense, knowledge, compassion, or care harm others.


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## Capistrono (Apr 12, 2010)

Betta fish are the worst for this type of thing. I hate going to the pet store and seeing all those tiny tanks marketed for bettas. 
I've kind of accepted at this point that the goldfish aren't going to live well or long. I just wish people didn't have too much pride to do things right. She acted like it was a ridiculous thing to get a tank double the size for just a fish.


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## Kitterpuss (May 9, 2014)

I actually feel people have the same attitude to rats. I bought a cage twice the size of my original for my rats recently, and I got the distinct impression from a few folk I know that this was a weird to spend money and give so much space to a 'pocket pet'. They're like "wow, all that for a few rats, they're totally spoilt, you're mental" . Humph! What's weird about doing good by the animals in your care?


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## ksaxton (Apr 20, 2014)

I never new bettas needed so much space and heated water, so now whenever I see them in little tanks I feel bad. This person at my work has a betta in a bowl smaller than a standard size basketball and I don't think it's heated. People don't think of fish as living things, they think Of them as purely decoration


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## Zabora (Jun 8, 2014)

Ugg I know the feeling. Bettas can live up to 8 years with proper care. Most people are lucky to get a year. We did lots of research about bettas before the roommate got one. We even were going to do a community tank but her betta is crazy and will try to capture and kill his food. He also tries to fight the waterfall from the filter.  he is such a nut. He lives in a 5.5 gal which is minimum space but its still acceptable with heater and filter that had been cycled. He is also on the proper food. Half the food they sell for fish isnt good for them. Like the red flakes contaain almost nothing a betta eats except for a small percentage of bloodworms...its just sad.


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## Effy (Oct 11, 2014)

*): It makes me so sad when people mistreat fish...they don't think they're 'alive' in the same sense. they believe the 30-second-memory myth and the lie about them having no feelings (or blood...).

My ex mother in law bought two fish for my dughter's second birthday. Tragic. I was so annoyed I can't even tell you...they came in the tiniest bowl, tiny bit of coloured gravel and awful food. That's it. And I was then the one who had to buy a proper tank and a filter and a heater (it was a VERY cold house) and proper food and plants and test strips and water treatments and buckets and medicine and clean the frickin' tank out.

I love fish, goldfish are one of my favourite animals...but I didn't want them. I felt bad for them and guilty that I didn't want them, but it hadn't been my choice and was a HUGE burden.

One of the fish came pre-installed with a fungal infection in its mouth and even with immediate treatment, its poor lower jaw was wrecked...a hole formed and split and it was basically left with a severe overbite. H learned to eat...but I literally not the figurative type of literal, literal literal) still have nitemares about mouth holes and fungal fuzz and food coming out. .______.
Makes me literally feel sick.

Unfortunately, they didn't live much longer than a year and a half, as they'd started off so sick...I tried my best.

And when people flush them? Dx

I can't stand it. I don't understand this heirarchy of life people have got, where the bigger the animal, the more it needs to be cared for and the more important it is...*


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## Capistrono (Apr 12, 2010)

Ahhh, you guys made me think of this, and it made me mad as well. Once we were watching America's Funniest Home videos, and one of the videos was of two small girls flushing their dead goldfish. One was maybe 3 or 4 and she started crying talking about how much she would miss her fish and it was played off as funny. Because of course only a child could care about a fish. Really made me mad, I buried my betta and cried when he died because he was one of my pets and I loved him. Really, fish would just be better off if they were outlawed as pets.


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## Grawrisher (Sep 10, 2013)

This really hist home for me, my roommate and I are CRAZY about fish (we keep all manner of goldfish...specifically because we're bad at temperature regulation with a heater, but we also love them) our fish are our babies and we get some weird reactions from our other roommates and from anyone we meet, we have run into some parasites and a few other illnesses but we always treat them (we actually got an oranda from walmart who had no fins but his tail from walmart, we treated him and some of his fins grew back) 
All our fish have names, they all have their own personalities and people think it's weird when we describe it
We monitor the water conditions, have double filtration, do frequent water changes, all of the "fish people" at petco and petsmart (the only decent stores here) know us when we walk in and ask how our fish are and what kind of goldfish we might be looking at
The fish form bonds with one another, at one point we had an ammonia problem and our black moore Wall-E passed away, our shubunkin Eva became visibly depressed, stopped eating and passed less than a week later

ALL of this is how goldfish SHOULD be treated, but they're not, they're stuffed into bowls or forgotten in half - empty, toxic aquariums


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## QueenBea (Feb 12, 2015)

Sadly my friend has a betta fish in a bowl far too small, and a ferret in a cage half the size recommended AT LEAST for a ferret... and at worse she used to have 4 ferrets, aparently the other 3 died in the first 2 years of having them... Gee I wonder why. :/ It's truely horrible.


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