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- Apr 3, 2017
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In my opinion, as is with several other posters, if you are overly concerned about the ethical aspect of keeping animals you should not be doing it in the first place. There is nothing ethical about keeping fish in an aquarium, dogs and cats in a home or birds in a cage. One we choose to have a pet we should realize that it is not an ethical practice. We are however morally responsible to ensure that we provide an adequate environment and habitat to ensure some acceptable quality of life for the animal we have chosen as our pet. New aquarium keepers are faced with a double edged sword. A lot of the experts in the hobby, either for or against quarantine, all realize that it is inevitable that new aquarium keepers will encounter issues regularly including livestock loss in the first years. If livestock death was a deciding factor for people staying in the hobby or leaving, this hobby would not exist. I disagree with some experienced pro quarantine hobbyist regularly insisting that quarantining fish is easy and people that don't do it are just lazy or don't care about their fish. The issue with quarantine is that their is some room for success but a lot more room for failure, especially for a new hobbyist without experience. Another issue, especially when running a medicated quarantine is time. Most people on here work full time jobs and have other responsibilities such as families that take up a lot of their time. The constant monitoring of a quarantine system is very time consuming. I should note also that a lot of the non quarantine long term reefers, Paul B comes to mind, regularly state that they do believe that new aquarist with newer tanks should be practicing some sort of quarantine, even if its just another smaller observation tank. I use natural ocean water for water changes so i don't quarantine as it would be pointless as if everything new added would have to be quarantined and that is not possible with my method.