How I Made My Fish Happy

[Raychel A Watkins]

It is uncanny that on a day that I set about to make my fish happier that the thing about PETA should come up.  I thought I would add to the comments on the PETA forum but I don't want to give them the time of day.  I want to talk about my fish.  We have all this about plants, pictures of how well our vegetables are doing and very little about the fish.  I love my fish and I have a desire for them to be comfortable and normal as I said once before.  If you saw my video on Matt's Miracle you would see that the lids on the fish tank are down.  I know that is how most people do it and I am sure there is some scientific prof that it does no harm etc, etc, etc.  Well I care and I feel the fish like the sun or at least the non darkness.  I know they love the plants on their tanks.  They hide under them, they eat, them and I personally think they feel better with them on the top.  So today I made a little experiment of my own.  Don't care that it is not in a referred journal.  It satisfied me.  I opened up the 4 tanks of Matt's miracle.  The fish always run away and hide in the back.  So I put several water hyacinth on top of them and walked away and left the lid up.  I left it up all afternoon and each time I came back to see what they were doing.  They were swimming around and hanging out under the hyacinths something they never had a chance to do.  Also when I came back to feed them in the late evening they came up to eat in my presence something they never do.  I was very satisfied that my fish were happy and comfortable.  

I talk to my fish everyday and I try to decided why they don't want to eat.  I can tell you the characteristic of each tank of fish.  Just because they may be eaten at a later date doesn't mean that I wont take the very best of care of them.  Maybe PETA will publish this under the title THE HUMANE TREATMENT OF FISH .NOT,  Peta just like to make noise.  I put them right up there with the Outdoor Circle in Hawaii and their treatment of the Oscar Meyer Winner mobile.

Anybody want to take up a collection and send PETA a box of live rats.  what do you think they would do with them.  I don't mean domestic rats either.  I have to tell you this story because I have thought of sending the rats more than  once.  When I lived in Omaha and taught at UNO I had a friend who loved animals and never liked to do any experiments with them.  At the time I had some mice in my house.  My professor friend said try to live trap them and let them loose outside.  I tried this for about a week or more to no avail.  Soon the mice were over running the house.  They destroyed the microwave, ate holes through the walls and generally destroyed things.  I got so mad went out and bought poison and didn't care one little bit wether it was humane or not.  That was the first time I wanted to send the Mice to PETA.

Along as we know we treat our fish right  I think we are ok.  What do they know about how to treat a fish anyway.  I wonder how they feel about big birds like eagles and herons that swallow the fish alive.  Just a thought.  A better thought is to make YOUR FISH HAPPY.

[Sahib Punjabi]

Namaste Raychel,

 

Yes we too love to see our fish happy. Our Koi and Goldfish actually eat from our hands. My wife gets really thrilled when they all try to eat from her had and end up jumping all around her hand. I recently had a visitor who was just stunned at this... he commented that he had visions of "Piranah's eating his hand"...now it is a totally different experience feeding my two foot long Koi than the babies...

[Kobus Jooste]

Not that I want to kill your fun with an explanation, but what you do with both a darkened tank or a tank with a lot of structure / plants in it is that you create a more natural habitat for the fish, with shelter.  This is especially useful for fish that is typically accustomed to such a habitat.  The shelter calms the fish, as it feels more secure to go out and forage for food if it is not an open water type species used to forage out in the open. As to your observation that we only photograph the plants, it may be because we battle to get a shot of the fish through the surface reflection and splashing!