Fair Fish?

You know the advice about not giving a child a pet for Christmas? Received alongside the stash  of new toys and clothes, the child or the family may discard the pet just as readily as the shiny gift paper. The danger of the gift is that it could lead to the mistreatment of the gift, in this case, the mistreatment of a live creature. It is not pro-life in the wider, more appropriate use of that term.

Today I hereby make an addendum to this advice: Do not let your child play any game at a carnival that involves winning fish unless they are already skilled fish keepers. Better yet, abandon the practice of giving away fish at all.

Here is the story that led me to this conclusion. Last night, my husband took our three kids to the elementary fair. They had a great time. Our two boys threw some ping-pong balls in a game and won some tiny goldfish, six in all. I come home later that night and find them swimming around in a plastic Rubbermaid shoebox filled with tap water. This was Mistake #1. When you win fish at a fair, they don’t come with any instructions or warnings like: Don’t put fish in tap water. It will kill them.

Saturday morning rolls around and three fish are floating on the top, two are moving sluggishly and one is still shows some energy. It’s clear the boys want to care for the fish (a healthy inclination) so we head to the pet store as soon as it opens. Eighty-four dollars and some odd cents later, we come out with all we need and one, well three, things we certainly did not need. You see, the nice young girl who sold us the tank, gravel, food and water drops made a huge error, Mistake #2. She sold us goldfish on the same day that she sold us their new home. After spending two hours trying to get the tank prepared and reading instructions that may have well been written in a language foreign to us, my husband called the pet store for advice (He had made Mistake #3, putting in the filter incorrectly). This is when we learn that a fish tank needs to sit at least a month without the fish in it to have the water stabilize. Why didn’t someone tell us that in the first place?!

So after spending three hours of a spring Saturday inside when we could have been outside planting flowers, helping them live, we discover that a total of nine fish have died or will soon die because of these many mistakes.

We call a family meeting and explain to our six and almost eight year old what happened and the certain fate of their new fish they had planned on naming. They actually took it pretty well and now they understand that our fish funeral will be a little larger than initially thought. They will wait patiently while the water is prepared to be a source of life, not death, for these little creatures with the cute eyes and mouths (their best features according the boys).

The lesson to me in all this is that  life is so messy, so full of contingencies, so interdependent. You don’t give a child a fish, hoping it will live, without understanding all that is needed to sustain life. What was going to be a new life for our house became a lesson in death. I’m cool with the lesson, but not cool with the casual way we treat life that is not human.

The next time you are at a fair or carnival and you are thinking, hey, my kid could win a cute fish, think again. Are you ready to care for a fish? Can you afford to care for it? If not, go on a ride instead.

Off to bury the fish…