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after reading the injecting posti have a question on ethics.

let me ask you something, and i know i will get many strong opitions but, why is it that in general fish that are injected are how would you say frowned apon, now the way i figured it was that it was causing pain to the fish?

now i often look at people who house long fin bettas in community tanks, and i wonder, seeing how the long fin is not a wild thing, and it was altered,(and not frowned on)
and people run monster power filters in their tanks with the betta, and the betta is struggling to live, b/c the tail picks up(correct me if i am wrong but "drag" or resitiance) and maybe the betta is straving to death, and with animal wild instinxes, dont they useing "swimming patterns" like their wild counter parts, as they didn't adopt to the long tail and haven't evoluted a a special swim tech. as these fish again feeling pain.

isn't this pain that the betta is feeling just like the pain a injected fish goes through,

other factors aside.. just a question i never got thats all, just for fun anyway.

The bettas long fins are a genetic adaptation / mutation, whatever you want to call it, but it came about due to selective breeding. Injecting a fish, is something entirely different. It is cruel to subject any creature to living conditions that are not appropriate to its well being (the tank you described).

I personally think that any artificially encouraged mutation in fish is a bad thing, certainly any mutation that affects physical fitness and performance in a fish is an absolute tragedy.

I understand that people find them pretty , but to me thats never a reason to handicap a fish, especially when its natural instincts dictate that it will always struggle to perform like a non-deformed fish. Its a great shame and it highlights yet another flaw with the human race, basically our lack of empathy, our lack or sympathy, and our willingness to sacrifice the health and happiness of an animal for our own vanity. Colour variants are often at greater risks from cancer, albinism also leads to cancers and light intolerance, inbreeding leads to loss of immune system , inherited genetic diseases, and the associated shortened longevities. Physical deformity that affects the evolutionary right of a fish to perform normally would not be tolerated by nature and is the worst of these, and to me, simply unacceptable. I'd rate it on a par with artificially colouring fish by injection, and either practice is equally needless.

You might find I get all sorts of responses to this post, anything from " well you could say its wrong to keep fish altogether" to " what harm does a bit of colour change do" to " it was born that way, it doesnt know anything different", but ultimately all that does is serve to show what people will willingly turn a blind eye to when they find something aesthetically pleasing. Personally I just find the whole thing a bit dissappointing.

Its a point of view, take it or leave it.

There are all sorts of inconsistancies in moral interpretation concerning petkeeping and animal welfare, I guess we all have to negotiate our way sensibly and do our best to curb our worst and most unthinking excesses. I think we all know when weve met someone with whom we do not share an opinion, who we know may be contributing to a practise that is less than beneficial to our fishy friends. Speak of it or not, the choice is yours, personally I think its good that such views are expressed.Some folks need to loosen up and some folks need their behaviour reigning in some, its the way of the world.

i don't really see a problem with the long fin if the fish is cared for properely and it can live happily, if not it should no longer be bredd for that trait. the dying though is a different story. there is proof that it harms the fish and therefore it should be illeagal. I beleive if you are going to cage an animal than it should be cared for in the best possible way.


chris

Injecting fish is like tattooing a person against his /her will & Dyed fish are more e to infections.


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Overall I don't like most mutations or selective breeding but I don't mind some that don't interfere with the animal's health. If the long fin bettas can be kept happily in a tank of appropriate size(don't think anything belongs in less than at least 5gallons) then that selective breeding is fine with me. Just make sure you use a little less flow. Some fish though don't just have more resistence but actually can't swim properly anymore. Certain goldfish come to mind. Personally I like my short finned rescued betta that lives contentedly in my 29g with over 200gph of flow and no swimming problems. I also prefer my wild looking feeder guppies with odd blotches of color, small size, and short fins to most of the fancy guppies I've seen. Most of the time the closer it is to wild caught the happier I am but if the fish isn't suffering due to the mutation and not just the way it is kept then I don't have a problem with other people keeping fish of that type.

Too right jason, except that its more like a psychopathic tattoist who insists on on stabbing people with a blunt pencil , using car paint for dye, and by holding them underwater repeatedly until hes finished without allowing them breathing equipment. Obviously he wouldnt sterilise the pencil , and getting aids would be almost standard.

His preferred victim of choice would be deformed people, and he'd use glasspaper gloves. Scary when you see it from the fishes point of view, and even more scary that the fish doesnt have the cognitive reasoning of a human being and probably assumes that its being slowly and painfully killed by something.A literal truth when you take into account the fish will probably get lymphostitis,or be systemically poisoned by the dye, and die weeks or months later.

It probably assumes theres no chance of survival , and if the tattooing takes several goes to complete, (which it almost inevitably will) the fish has to go through that massive fear and pain repeatedly.

I may directly punch anyone I catch doing this repeatedly in the face until I feel happier about the situation. That could take a year or two....

If people complain about it , I will say "Its ok , he didnt feel pain like we do, and I think the new look suits him, after all its only a human, one of the most numerous and pointless species on earth".

I am aginst the very thought of injecting fish for cosmetic/visual enhancement all for profit.
lets just kepp them in tanks where they can be happy and ......subjected to ....

The question posed is actually a pitfall. I actually watched a discovery channel program on natural vs. unatural selection. There is a crab in japan that has evolved a face of a samurai on its back, why? Well in the 1200's a "gang" of samurai were killed by the rival "gang" and the last of the living ones jumped into this inland sea and drowned. The fishermen started finding the deformed crabs and thinking that they were the faces of the passed samarai threw them back not to discrace their memory. Over the next thousands of years the crabs bearing such faces grew in numbers to were there are just as many if not more then them then the original shelled ones in this sea.

Granted this was done not for the esthetics of the crab but because of the esthetics of the fish. The addaptation stopped the crabs from being eaten. So from this stand point the colour or fin morphs that have been developed have been done to save said fish from possibley bad water conditions or being discarded as breeding stock for better looking ones. Some of these fish though they wouldnt live in the wild wouldnt live very long if left in a store aquarium knowing some conditions of store aquariums, (not all)because they were "ugly" this term being relitive to said species and not between various species.

So the addaptation though men are choosing which to breed nature is balancing by producing said fish to increase the viability of the new fish being grown in captivity.

Crewly keeping a fish in a tank to small for it ranks up there with the treatment of veal cows. I dont want to see a fish that has its dorsal fin and tailfin hanging out of the tank because its some kind of new "Bonsi-Kitten" (if not familiar with this joke it was a highly contraversial website that joked about how they could grow kittens in oddly shapen glass jars and feed them and medicate them thru tubes to cause them to mold themselves to the shape of the container.) Animal cruelty is animal cruelty and the same goes for an animal in a small space a person in a small space an animal being wrongfully tattooed or a human being tattooed.

All things aware of there existance are animals and creulty to them of these sorts be it confinement of something, half submersing, a fish or human permenantly just cause you can or tattoing them in harsh painfull and deadly ways it is still wrong.

But selection be it natural or unnatural is still an addaptation for survival and it is a fully developed characteristic of what it means to be alive. Otherwise we would be extinct as were many other animals when the conditions became to harsh for them to live in.

just my two cents.

Now.. I'm just as against the dying of fish as the next person... but just a quick thought.. and i don't necessarily want to start a big brawl on this either...

If a said fish is injected... he will be sold to an LFS and left for dead because people don't want to purchase them in hopes of the dying to stop... but someone who doesn't know this (me when i first started for example)..will buy them and keep the market going..

so my question or thought..haha.. is ... wouldn't it be a nice thing to actually get it and take care of it in hopes of giving it a better life than the one he's destined in a small 10 gallon box at the LFS filled with dozens of his kind?? or would this just be too risky in terms of diseases??

I bought 6 "mixed fruit" tetras when I first got an aquarium... not knowing they were dyed of course.. and of the 6.. I still have two..and it's been nearly 2 years..they're the most healthy and strong fish i've even kept..

Again, I'm not condoning this practice.. just a thought..shouldn't or couldn't we maybe try to give them a better life???

One question I have is this.

At some point, veterinary science will advance to the point where diseases that cannot be treated today will become treatable tomorrow. However, some of those treatments might involve injections. At this point, the question becomes, do you not inject the fish and thus deprive it of a potentially life saving treatment, or do you inject the fish and subject it to a lot of stress in doing so, but with the motive of saving its life and curing it of disease? Bit of a tricky one this ... on balance, I'd go for the injection on the basis that trying to save its life and cure it of a possibly agonising disease overrides the discomfort of injection.

Of course, when we reach this stage, perhaps veterinary science will also have devised a superior solution to the hypodermic needle in the case of fishes - fingers crossed!


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Im certainly not against the administration of medications by needle, its an entirely different ball game, as I could be quoted with having said before, a little suffering can be worth a shot at survival. Im not the biggest lover of life, but if someone stabs me in the knee and cures cancer that way, ill take it over dying in vast pain all covered in lumps. I suspect a lot of animals will too, and its up to us to try and make that process for animals as pleasant and as quick as possible. Obviously theres no point of constantly badgering a badly stricken animal with loads of hopeless cures when the prognosis is ridiculously bad, but when there is a reasonable chance of survival I say use what you have, even if it is a little painful.

One is suffering and the protection of life, and life quality, the other is the suffering and the endangerment of life through vanity.

Possibly the unhappiest situation for both animal and human is the incessant treatment of terminally ill specimens, to treat or to kill, or to just provide pain relief.Making that call is a daily issue for sick animals and humans , vets and doctors alike, and then I guess youre getting into arguements about euthanasia etc, and that is always a difficult subject.

One thing there is to be said for it though is that at least such things are honest attempts to better life quality, but even then you need to know when to sensibly "call time" on an issue. I think a sensible balance needs to be maintained. I one had to force feed a psychologically maladjusted green iguana for 12 months. Not many people would have done that, but I persisted, and the problem was eventually solved. I actually cried when he took the first banana from my hand willingly, and he lived another 15 years, sired many baby green iguanas and reached about 6'5 before he finally died of the complications of old age, in his sleep aged 19 years. Hed had a full life, and gutted though I was to have lost him, we had been companions through life, shared much information with the community, with him I pioneered a few adjustment and destressing techniques for lizards and shared that information with the herpetological community. I consider not a second of the suffering he went through to have not been worth it.

He taught me a huge amount of what I know, he gave me a sense of pride in my work,and the shame of my failings, and he taught me what it is to be wild of heart and come to terms with life, by his bravery, and his stalwart refusal to give up. He taught me what it was to see life through the eyes of another, and never , ever, to allow animal suffering to occur in my presence for whatever reason, never to call time too early, and to absolutely do whatever it takes to beat illness, and preserve life quality for all animals. It is because of him that several thousand more animals still walk the earth than there might otherwise be. He is the one that turned me from being a mental child who had to own animals irrelevant of my ability to keep them, to someone who worked in the animal care industry, gives out advice on a daily basis, who wishes to preserve every scrap of the environment possible, and right a few of the wrongs of the pet industry. In short, he indirectly forced me to grow up, and face what it was I was doing wrong.

In fact a small dedication to the least understanding and yet most forgiving creature I have known.My only regret was that I was never able to release him back to his guatamalan home, where he would have found his true nature, and where he was torn from by a greedy pet industry

"My" Iguana. (as if the spirit of such a creature can ever be caged).

Sengoku.


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Bettas with long finns can be breed to have the long fins, versus an injected fish that when breed with another injected fish will give you a regular fish. As for the mis treatment of bettas, I am one against putting them in community tanks with other fish tankmates (I have had good experiences with bettas and inverts though) Bettas are good in 2-10 gal tanks, with small/no filter and good water changes.

Also, not buying injected fish IS a good way to stop the sales. By spreading the truth about these colorful fish is a BETTER way to stop thier sales. Also, just because a fish is unbought doesnt mean it is going to die in a crowded tank. Most fish that I see in stores are gone in a week weather I buy them or not

Inky

My LFS stopped selling painted glass tetra because people stopped buying them once they realized what was going on. Score one for our side!

Just read longhairedgit's big post above. Hat tip for a moving and informative account.

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002