saltyzoo":p8azhjce said:
Ok. Because you don't keep fish it's ok for someone else to torture them? :?
I repeat again. We can certainly debate whether we should keep fish or not, but that is not relevant to whether it is ok to cause harm to them once they are safely in our care. I think it is also important that we are concerned about the fish that make it into someone's tank and not just the fish that have yet to be collected, although I agree that both issues are important. If a puffer dies due to poor husbandry, how many more will die in transport to replace it? Don't you feel it's important to be sure we do our best to keep them alive and stress free once they are collected?
salty, do you
not read the posts to which you are responding? Please, point out where I said this. Again, prove to me that gently eliciting a response from a puffer to puff is "torture". Just because you vehemently insist it
is so does
not make it so. Not even garnering Mr. Borneman's support in your "cause" will make it so. I would dearly love to know how many puffers you have actually had interaction with, what special areas of study make you so expert in puffer psychology or physiology. Or is it simply that you so dearly
love your pet that you have lost the means by which to balance your view? There is nothing wrong with loving your pet, not at all. But passing such harsh judgement upon others whose perspective is different, well...you do appear to have a case of the "high and mighty's" going on here.
Clearly, you know very little about the rest of the chain from collection to final sale, and clearly don't care to comment on any other aspect I've mentioned in my previous post. Could it be because
you are one of those who "purchases first and asks questions later"? If so, are you still this sort? If not, what changed your stance?
In any event, I still feel that there has been a loss of perspective, especially when considering the grand scheme of things. In my opinion, time would be better spent in our Industry forum learning more about how almost
all our (marine) fish came to be here. You might also want to spend time studying more closely the threads here, on RC, and on other sites that are started by people who simply made an impulse purchase, only to wonder "What do I do now?" I am wondering if you can even begin to fathom how many animals are
truly tortured -- through starvation, being placed into a small glass box with animals who predate upon them, or whose physiological needs cannot begin to be met (osmotic shock, ammonia poisoning anyone?) -- by simple desire of acquisition married to true ignorance. When compared to this grand scale, a scale which does not encompass fishes only, but will include a VAST myriad of animals wild and domestic, getting SO worked up over the gentle pinching of a puffer becomes sadly ridiculous, nay,
laughable.
I happen answer questions for Mr. Fenner as a member of the WetWebMedia crew on a daily basis from people who do
just this (WWM's Daily FAQ's). They see a fish, or any other animal aquatic, and simply
must have it. They then find themselves in the unenviable position of trying to figure out how best to prolong the life (yet far too often ultimately killing) their new acquisition! This series of events is so common as to be entirely ubiquitous, and is far more worthy of the time and energy you're devoting here. (I'm going to completely avoid the issues of anemones, mandarins, and SHARKS, for time and space considerations.)
