Fish Are Pets

When you ask anyone to give you a choice of the ideal pet, whoever says fish? Yet fish are pets and we treat them so differently. The true fish keeper will tell you there is far more to keeping fish than just feeding them.

It all starts with the best placement of the tank, similar to the size of dog you would by for the home it lives in. Next is the size of the tank you want and then that would govern how many fish you can keep and also what fish you can keep, as some like to be alone and yet others like to live in a community.

Once you have got your head around that then you have got to set up your tank, it is not a case of simply adding water and putting your fish in their new home, you have to make it safe for them, you got to create an ecosystem for them with beneficial bacteria that breaks down the fishes waste and that takes time, a lot of time, sometime months.

I say all this, as over the last few years I have successfully been keeping and breeding tropical fish but today I had to make the hardest decision about the fate of some of my fish in one of my larger tanks.

An illness that affects fish keepers once or twice in a lifetime of this hobby is the dreaded ICH. A disease that is so contagious that it can wipe out whole tanks of livestock within days and unfortunately my fish have it. I have attempted to treat this infected tank and at one stage I thought I had caught it in time but as one day ends and a new one begins I am faced with another dead fish. It has been so hard to tell the recovery rate over the mortality rate that my only decision now is to no longer allow these fish to suffer and to send them all to fishy heaven and treating them with the dignity that any pet should have.