Owning a Goldfish to Become Illegal?

[Super Dude]

https://www.clickondetroit.com/pets/28268225/detail.html

Owning A Goldfish Illegal?
Ban Proposed To Ban Goldfish Being Mulled In San Francisco
POSTED: Friday, June 17, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- San Francisco's Animal Control and Welfare Commission is recommending that the City ban the sale of goldfish, tropical fish and guppies.
The recommendation to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is part of the commission's ongoing efforts to discourage "impulse buys" of animals.

The commission's ban would cover pet stores and breeders in the City. It comes after more than a year of study and findings that aquarium fish are often mass bred under inhumane conditions or stripped from the wild.

says: Honestly, I thought it sounded crazy and ridiculous at first, but nearly every aquatic creature my family owned when I was a child died, and not just naturally but from maltreatment by me or my brothers (unwittingly of course, but it's still pretty bad); it pretty much amounted to fish genocide.  Just like every other natural thing in the world, we need to save the goldfish from ourselves.

[Kosmo]

lulz.

Makes sense to be honest.

[Sigz]

A better way would just be to charge a moderate fee for a license/tax to purchase fish. It'll discourage the parents who don't want to spend the extra money on a fish their kids will just kill in month anyways, but the hobbyists will still be able to do their thing.

Either way though, it's pretty stupid. Pretty much every industry even tangentially related to animals is involved in some form of animal cruelty, why go after pet fish of all things?

[Zydar]

Klaus Heissler is happy about this.

[Jirpo]

I am an avid fish keeper, and I just can't stand it when I'm in a store and I hear people buying just one of a species that needs to be kept with others of its kind, or getting more than one of a species that is highly territorial. I always research fish before I buy them and I am a member of the Perth Cichlid Society (fish keeping society of my city), as well as a regular poster on their forums. It doesn't help that a lot of the stores have workers that know next to nothing about fish, leading people to make wrong purchases. I mean, I know Goldfish and Guppies aren't excatly the hardest fish to keep, but people need to take the hobby of fishkeeping way more seriously. Its different from dogs or cats - they breathe the same air that we do, but it can require some work to keep a fish tanks water in good quality.

Sigz idea is very good. I wish that would be implemented here in Australia.

[7StringedBeast]

Does anyone find it stupid they use the term inhumane conditions when describing non humans?

[Super Dude]

Does anyone find it stupid they use the term inhumane conditions when describing non humans?

I dunno, I always thought that it was supposed to describe the behavior itself, as in the treatment given by the subject to the object is not fitting of human "maturity" (for lack of a better word).

[ZirconBlue]

Does anyone find it stupid they use the term inhumane conditions when describing non humans?

No.  

[Super Dude]

Orly?

[ReaPsTA]

Wait, wait.  I need to clarify an aspect of this article, because if I remember what I read correctly...

WE'RE TALKING ABOUT GOLD FISH.

Why is the word inhumane being used in the context of how they're treated?  My school keeps Beta fish in glass containers so you can put mirrors on the edges of the tanks and watch them attack themselves.

This is what the government of San Fransisco wastes its time on?

[7StringedBeast]

That was exactly my point.

[Jirpo]

Do animals not have the right to be kept in good conditions?

[ReaPsTA]

Do animals not have the right to be kept in good conditions?

Christ, dude.  You can't see the difference between a poodle and a goldfish?

[rumborak]

I don't know whether it's necessary to ban it, but damn, goldfish bowls are definitely animal cruelty. Up there with bird cages.

rumborak

[ricky]

San Francisco's Animal Control and Welfare Commission must be pretty bored.

[ReaPsTA]

San Francisco's Animal Control and Welfare Commission must be pretty bored.

Which is good, because that means there's no stray/unspayed and neutered/abandoned/abused dogs and cats anywhere in the city.

[El Barto]

I think the issue needs to be dealt with by the retail community ( can't believe I'm saying that).  They shouldn't be selling betas in little brandy snifters and that sort of thing.  They shouldn't be selling unfiltered fish bowls.  In fact, rather than outlawing the hobby, why don't they just ban the sell of any aquarium less than 30 gallons (with an exception for people needing a quarantine tank)?  That would remove impulse buying from the equation, methinks.

Even as a kid, my fish tended to do pretty well.  Nowadays, the average life expectancy for a fish in my care is about 12 years.  While they might not have a river to live in, they're also not in constant danger of being eaten by other fish or hungry townsfolk.  I'm not sure a fish in my care isn't better off than a fish trying to cut it in the wild.  They're certainly fed better.

There's plenty of shitty practices going on in the LFSs.  But there are also examples of reasonable self-regulation.  Painted glass fish are a good example of that.  Bring awareness to the problem and let the LFSs sort it out on their own.

[zerogravityfat]

when i read racism or crazy christian crap, i know it will be the south. when i read over the top liberalism and politically correct crap, i know it will be cali.

[Gadough]

San Francisco's Animal Control and Welfare Commission must be pretty bored.

Which is good, because that means there's no stray/unspayed and neutered/abandoned/abused dogs and cats anywhere in the city.

I detect sarcasm.

[rumborak]

when i read racism or crazy christian crap, i know it will be the south. when i read over the top liberalism and politically correct crap, i know it will be cali.

Yeah, but the trick is that the news are interested in perpetuating the stereotype, so out of the thousands of news items they *could* report on, they report on the ones that confirm the stereotype.

rumborak

[LeeHarveyKennedy]

A long overdue idea. Too many kids are getting high on goldfish these days.

[chknptpie]

Do animals not have the right to be kept in good conditions?

Christ, dude.  You can't see the difference between a poodle and a goldfish?

I need some clarification on this statement. Because a goldfish can't be walked and pet, does it deserve less then a dog?

[ZBomber]

One of the reasons so many people get goldfish for their kids is because goldfish are often used as a first pet. You feed it and clean its cage and that's pretty much it. If your kid can't handle that, you're probably not gonna get them a pet that takes even more work.

My family have a couple goldfish out in our pond, they're over 10 inches long! They can grow to be quite large if given the right environment, and ours have been around for a couple years now.

[ReaPsTA]

I need some clarification on this statement. Because a goldfish can't be walked and pet, does it deserve less then a dog?

That wasn't what I was trying to convey.

The thing it it's a matter of how evolved the intelligence is.  When they're not laying around or asking to go outside, my dogs actually care about me and my family and empathize with us.  If we're sitting around and talking the dogs come in and hang out just to be there.  When I'm sad about something my one dog wants to be there and lick my face.  Meanwhile, if we had a Goldfish, the house could be on fire and the thing would just swim around lackadaisically in its bowl.

It's not even like I'm trying to promote Goldfish cruelty.  Part of the reason I don't want to get one and why I don't even enjoy looking at other people's fish is because living in a bowl with a diameter not even five times your length is probably the worst existence ever.  I mean, oh my god.

So why does this law and the people semi-defending it still offend me?  The humanization of the goldfish.  Simply because they're alive and I'm alive too there's a degree of empathy there.*  And I don't get off on animal cruelty, even to fish.  But the idea of a Goldfish living in "inhumane conditions" is almost logically fallacious to me because they don't process their living conditions like people do.  And, I mean, come on, people actually worry about this?  We don't have better things to do?  It's such a silly thing to do and people are reacting to it with a seriousness that's so out of proportion.  Like I said, it's a Goldfish! o_O

Also, to bring back in the dog analogy.  I know this is a very PETA thing to say, but there are some people - not a very large amount - but some people who I think of as less human than my dogs.  Except for Ted Bundy/John Wayne Gacy/Jeffery Dahmer/etc, the idea of the life of any Goldfish being more valuable than the life of a human is incomprehensible.  Because it's a fucking Goldfish.

------------

* For example.  The whole thing where you eat a Goldfish as a dare or whatever is borderline sociopathy.  How anyone could do that, even to a Goldfish, is mildly frightening.

[rumborak]

The issue, for me, is really to provide an animal-appropriate environment. A goldfish bowl is not an appropriate environment for a goldfish. A tank, fine.
Yes, one needs to take into account the "mental susceptibility" of the animal in question, but I'm pretty sure a goldfish "knows" that something's amiss when its range of motion is not exceeding a few liters of water.

rumborak

[chknptpie]

That wasn't what I was trying to convey.

The thing it it's a matter of how evolved the intelligence is.

Part of the reason I don't want to get one and why I don't even enjoy looking at other people's fish is because living in a bowl with a diameter not even five times your length is probably the worst existence ever.

But the idea of a Goldfish living in "inhumane conditions" is almost logically fallacious to me because they don't process their living conditions like people do.  

Just going to pare this down to the essentials...

How do you know how evolved the intelligence is?

If you think of it as the worst existence ever, then why let it go on?

How do you know how they process their living conditions?

[ReaPsTA]

The issue, for me, is really to provide an animal-appropriate environment. A goldfish bowl is not an appropriate environment for a goldfish. A tank, fine.
Yes, one needs to take into account the "mental susceptibility" of the animal in question, but I'm pretty sure a goldfish "knows" that something's amiss when its range of motion is not exceeding a few liters of water.

rumborak

All true, but how important is it?  Enough for government action?  No way.

Just going to pare this down to the essentials...

How do you know how evolved the intelligence is?

If you think of it as the worst existence ever, then why let it go on?

How do you know how they process their living conditions?

A living being's actions show its intelligence and degree of evolution.  It's not much more complicated than that.  Goldfish aren't giving me anything to indicate their process thought on any meaningful level.

Which is why their living in a bowl doesn't really bother me.  I mean, I'd imagine the brain of the Goldfish mostly comes down to: "Go this way.  Okay, can't go here anymore.  Let's go this way.  Oh, can't go there anymore.  Okay, let's go this way.  Hm, it's the time of day I'm about to be fed.  Food is here.  Swim to the top of the bowl and get it.  I don't think I need food for a while.  Let's go this way."  I'm sure I'm going overboard, but still.  While I think of living in a Goldfish bowl as terrible, there's also the issue of me projecting my views of a Goldfish's life onto the Goldfish, which is a totally different species.  For all I know they love it because they don't ever have to deal with predators or food competition.

And how do I know how they process their living conditions?  Truthfully, I'm not a Neuroscientist or a Marine Biologist so I just try to weigh what I see.  I see zero evidence that Goldfish process any sort of advanced cognition, so why would I assume they do?

[El Barto]

Animals maintain an instinctive awareness of their appropriate surroundings, even if they're born and raised outside of them.  In this case, it's ability and desire to be able to swim in a specific manner is denied.  Some cichlids like to slowly putz around in rocky environments, while others, even ones from the same general area, like to be able haul ass over long distances.  There isn't much hauling ass in a 2' long tank.  Some spend there time sifting through soft sand, and gravel really troubles them greatly.  It's all a function of their instinctive behavior.

Like I said earlier, and somebody later suggested the same thing, the solution is to ban specific habitats, not specific fish.  

[chknptpie]

A living being's actions show its intelligence and degree of evolution.  It's not much more complicated than that.  Goldfish aren't giving me anything to indicate their process thought on any meaningful level.

Which is why their living in a bowl doesn't really bother me.  I mean, I'd imagine the brain of the Goldfish mostly comes down to: "Go this way.  Okay, can't go here anymore.  Let's go this way.  Oh, can't go there anymore.  Okay, let's go this way.  Hm, it's the time of day I'm about to be fed.  Food is here.  Swim to the top of the bowl and get it.  I don't think I need food for a while.  Let's go this way."  I'm sure I'm going overboard, but still.  While I think of living in a Goldfish bowl as terrible, there's also the issue of me projecting my views of a Goldfish's life onto the Goldfish, which is a totally different species.  For all I know they love it because they don't ever have to deal with predators or food competition.

And how do I know how they process their living conditions?  Truthfully, I'm not a Neuroscientist or a Marine Biologist so I just try to weigh what I see.  I see zero evidence that Goldfish process any sort of advanced cognition, so why would I assume they do?

Thanks for letting me plays devils advocate without the debate spewing out of proportion. I guess I have a different thought process that states if I don't understand or know how another animal/species works I assume they can feel emotions and pain just as I do. I tend to put myself in the same position and see how I would like it. Even if its just a goldfish, I still think it deserves the best I could give it.

[rumborak]

And how do I know how they process their living conditions?  Truthfully, I'm not a Neuroscientist or a Marine Biologist so I just try to weigh what I see.  I see zero evidence that Goldfish process any sort of advanced cognition, so why would I assume they do?

Well, the point to make here is that, the ability to be depressed does not depend on high cognitive abilities. Those are very basic emotions and are displayed in a range of animals. Just because a fish is not able to solve complex math puzzles doesn't mean it can't be depressed because of its surroundings. I mean, put yourself into a tiny room, and you will most likely get claustrophobia. And not because you feel you have been deprived of your liberties as granted by the Constitution of the United States, but because your brain wiring is putting you into a fight-or-flight response. I would think that a goldfish would even more be governed by these emotions.

rumborak

[ricky]

what bothers me is that the san fransisco legal system has to put aside time for crap like this when i'm sure they have more pressing matters to attend to besides "goldfish rights".

[King Postwhore]

When I read where the quote was from from I thought the cruelty was directly associated to the city.  Next thing you know, gerbils will be banned from San Fran.

[LeeHarveyKennedy]

When I read where the quote was from from I thought the cruelty was directly associated to the city.  Next thing you know, gerbils will be banned from San Fran.

Pretty sure that will never happen...

[lonestar]

This is what the government of San Fransisco wastes its time on?

As a lifelong SF Bay Area native, all I can say is...
















yep.

[7StringedBeast]

I don't think goldfish have enough memory span to be able to get bored or depressed in a bowl.  At least that's what I've learned.