Yesterday I took Lucy and her little pal from down the street to buy some new fish for Lucy's aquarium. We reviewed the rules for our outing in the car on the way there. No smacking the fish tanks, no yelling, and no wandering off. The last one being the most important as I still have this idea in the back of my head that the only people who keep fish tanks are coke dealers and villains in movies. I am pretty sure a coke dealer wouldn't run off with two squiggly little kids, one of them wearing rubber rain boots on an 80 degree day. Villains on the other hand, well I don't even want to think about it. We pick out our fish, and a new fancy castle for them to move into, and off we go in a cloud of complaints about being thirsty and hungry and having to go to the bathroom. It doesn't matter how much I feed 'em or make 'em "go" before we leave the house, the second we arrive somewhere with no public restroom, their wee bladders fill up like cisterns, and they are hungry like wolverines.
We make it home, settle the fish in and feast on apples and all is well. Then I relax and look at the fish for a while. They seemed to swim around in an absolute panic. Poor little dears! There they where, swimming around, enjoying their day, and here comes these big giant eyeballs that stuff them in a plastic bag and dumps them in a foreign land with fish they have never met before. The woman at the fish store told me that tetras are school fish, so I bought three so that they could have pals. What if we had picked fish that didn't get along? Three can be a treacherous number for groups. What if they were stuck until death with fish that they didn't get along with? I felt certain the big one looked like a close talker with strong body odor. The sunfire was all alone. The fish lady had said that because sunfires are live bearers (me too) if there is more than one, they would multiply quickly. Now he was all alone in the tank. Alone and orange. The guppies are gray, the tetras are gray, the placostomous is gray. I hope he doesn't have trouble getting a job. I spent the rest of the day feeling just craptastic.
This morning I wake up feeling better. Sleep always helps me let go of minor guilt. Then I read the paper. There is an opinion piece in The Oregonian by Pamela Frasch in response to a previous opinion piece by Jonathan Nicholas. Gross. The original piece had stated that keeping elephants in captivity is cruel. Mr. Nicholas sited the way the new mother elephant at the zoo had treated her newborn calf as evidence. She had bonked it around and generally tried to ignore it. The woman today argued that it wasn't the captivity, it was the abuse the mother elephant had received at the hands of a former elephant trainer. Maybe she just wanted to be a career elephant and resented the assumption that she wanted to be a mother in the first place. Who knows? But my sad feeling was back in full force.
I have always had pets. Dogs, cats, hamsters, chickens, I have loved them all. But maybe my assumptions about their well beings where really off base. I would adopt a pet from the humane society, or tame a wild kitty, neuter it and call it my own. What if cats like being feral? What if coming in from the cold, cold world to climb carpeted trees is not their idea of a great life? Maybe dogs would be happier packing up and roaming the streets feasting on rogue babies and wild pot roast. And the hamster wheel! Good lord, I have been to the gym, how could I do that to a little furry thing? Maybe the cold, cold world is what all the fur and claws are for.
I will not be letting the fish go free. For one thing they are tropical, and the closest river is significantly colder than the recommended 75 degree fahrenheit and full of radiation and raw sewage. And besides, I was born a human animal. I am here to be entertained right? This is another one of those terrible injustices of the world that I just have to let sit in the back of my mind and fester. I should just enjoy my opposable thumbs and buy a dancing bear.