Ive been waiting for someone with your like mind opinion, So your telling me that when your fish die its as significant as the loss of a dog. Well buddy if your going around sheding tears for lost fish and going to the extent of burying them like your four pawed family member when they pass than your perspective of value for every living organism is right on! However there is a reason people who share my perspective on drawing a line in the sand when it comes to the significance for certain living organisms.
I know my place in the food chain and some of the fish you admire in aquariums ive fished and eating for dinner so excuse me for feeling a lack of compassion for what ever pet fish i put in my tank. So inless your a vegan save me the i do it for the fish speech.
You think Mike Vick would have went to jail for fighting fish! Lol
I'm sorry perhaps I wasn't clear in my intention. To me it's more about wasting the resources. Draw your line where you wish I consider all life to be significant and should not be wasted so I can have something pretty in my house. Just so you know I'm a biologist by trade and personally I don't hold a dog above a fish, or a rat. If you fish and catch a food fish and eat it great, however if you said I catch fish toss em on the bank and let em rot I'd have issue with that. I eat meat too, but I would not consider it ethical or right to abuse and torture those animals just because they are destined to be on my plate. The main reason I don't eat wild fish or do so very rarely is pretty much all those fisheries are managed so poorly and most are in rapid decline or have pretty much collapsed, Georges Bank comes to mind or the salmon fisheries where I live. I myself prefer to catch and release to preserve the resource. I let a 75lb dorado along with several nice sailfish go when fishing offshore in Costa Rica got a quick pic then back to the sea, that is 10 fish still swimming and could be caught by the next guy rather than removing 10 fish from fishery. When I trout fish here in the west the only places to catch large mature Wild trout is in the designated catch and release streams as they are next to nonexistent in the kill fisheries, you can get little 5" hatchery guys but nothing wild or big.
Do I feel bad when a creature in my charge dies, yes I do. I must be a freak as I feel the same way when a coral or other invert dies too, especially if due to my negligence. Everyone has different levels of attachment to their charges. If you don't cry when your fish die that's fine I don't either, but I do take their bodies and place them around scrubs and trees at my house to let the fish return its nutrients back in the web of life. Luckily I'm still mostly dependent on buying plant food for the trees.
So let me ask you as you sort of brought it up. Do you think Mike Vick felt he was doing anything wrong maybe he thinks of dogs the same way you think of fish. Is he wrong in your mind for fighting dogs if his view is the same? I just consider it wasteful of a living thing and cruel. If you go to Korea, Vietnam or Indonesia you note a lack of the pawed family members you spoke of. That's because they are the other red meat and are consumed by the locals. I don't have an issue with this either they are not wasting the animals and because they raise and eat dogs there's a lot of local wildlife that does not wind up in the pot.
It's about conservation of the resource and I think we all have a role to play. If you buy fish as ornaments then dump back to the LFS. Should the LFS have any responsibility for the animal, maybe it just gets euthanized when they can't move it so they can open the tank for something they can move, what about the wholesaler who maybe over packs bags because shipping costs are higher than livestock value, or the collector who uses cyanide to collect the fish, it's efficient and the fish will only live a short life so the consumer will be back for more sooner good for business. This is my point if we just consider these animals as consumables and expendable then soon this resource will be unavailable to the hobby.