|
Animal protection laws are for cats and dogs, not fish.
Check this shit out: I was on YouTube once looking for paroon shark videos. A paroon shark is not a shark, but rather a catfish--one that grows to 10 feet long and enjoys eating dogs. (The fish is native to the Mekong River in Vietnam.) It's also famous for being able to kill fishermen; there are stiff spines on its head, as many catfish have, and they're poison-coated, as many catfish spines are, but most catfish spines aren't attached to a fish this big. You bring one up in a net, and it CAN fuck you up and WILL if given the chance.
But back to the point of this thing: there are videos of people with paroons in 120-gallon aquaria. A 120-gallon aquarium is no small thing--it's 6 feet long by 18 inches square at the end--but it's minuscule to a fish that size. But morans look at these videos (most of which feature the very, very predatory paroon shark eating live fish) and bitch about anyone saying they need to put the animal in a larger container...like a koi pond, or a breeding pond in Thailand, or to just leave the fish in the Mekong. I've been called a faggot repeatedly for suggesting that a fish so large is eventually going to be released, where it would cause an environmental catastrophe especially if you live along the Gulf Coast, where there are waterways warm enough for the fish to survive over the winter in. In reality, you could do the Vietnamese thing and eat the paroon shark when it outgrows your container, but most people won't. This would be more humane than keeping it in a 55-gallon tank (which has been done, on the grounds that it will grow to the size of the tank then stop...guys, that doesn't mean "wait till it gets three feet long before you think about getting it out of there")
If there were animal cruelty laws for fishes, this would end some of the more bizarre things you see like this one tank at Petsmart that contained three species of fish--pacus and two I don't remember--that won't fit in any aquarium they sell. Pacus shouldn't be sold anyway because they get too big to handle, but come on: you can almost get away with pacu if you've got 500 to 1000 gallons of water for one to swim around in. Those puny little 150-gallon aquariums will not do it. And the 29-gallon aquariums their stupid clerks recommend?
|