Pet Store Mayham

The fishy threat!

Pet stores carry a kind of goldfish, the Comet in this case, though better known to the public as feeder fish. The goldfish that can be won at a fair, and are expected to not make it through the night. The same fish used to feed reptiles. They cost less than a quarter, and are literally born and breed to die.

Now these fish can survive for years when properly taken care of, but that’s not the point of this particular story.

A fish, like all living things, needs oxygen to survive! So it should be no big surprise, that a fish, in a closed and sealed jar... with no air holes... will run out of oxygen and die.

Now the more fish you put in a jar with limited oxygen, the faster the oxygen runs out, and the quicker the fish die.

So one night this elderly women come in with her son. She's "from he old country" and speaks no English, so he middle aged son is doing all the translating. With them they have a large gallon jar, sealed, with 15 dead goldfish floating in it.

They explain that she's watching the fish while her nephew is out of town, and they just died! So after explaining the whole concept of oxygen and life, and that fish can't survive with out air, let alone that each fish should have 3 galleons of water each, let alone 15 fish in 1 gallon. Essentially... she killed the fish.

So they decided that they are going to buy 15 fish, hopefully 15 that look very similar, to replace them. Not that that's shady enough as it is, they still didn't seem to get, that they need a large tank... and that sure they can get those fish, but once they put then in that jar and seal it, or for that matter not seal it, it's too small, and the fish WILL DIE. So it's suggested that perhaps the best thing to do, would be to explain what happened to the nephew, and he can buy more fish when he has the proper tank set up.

They won't have this... they need these fish now, because the nephew can't know!

At this point a manager makes the decision to not sell them the fish. Seeing that any live animal should have a proper home, and there is no way these fish are going to survive, we can't sell any living animal, including $0.25 fish to imminent death.

At this point the son in furious. And he starts throwing out threats. The biggest being that he's going to sue the store for accusing his mother of being a murderer and refusing to sell them fish. In the end they got the fish (to avoid the pointless lawsuit).

They whole thing was ridiculous! And the store was almost sued for attempting to save the lives of fish (that, lets be honest, would have gotten eaten by a turtle rather than died in a jar if we hadn't sold them).

Those pour fish really have nothing to live for.