Almost everything in this hobby could be considered cruel, depending on how & who is viewing it. My point was that millions of fish die every year, for one reason or another, due to our selfish wants/needs to keep fish in a glass box.
Collecting fish in the wild, and keeping them in a glass box is no more cruel than keeping domestic raised fish in poor conditions. I suspect that millions of LFS specimens are killed each year within the first 30 days, while someone is using live fish to cycle their new pet store purchased aquarium. It's a slow and I would imagine agonizing death for a fish. At least the bleach killed the fish in the video rather quickly. Commercial fishing kills millions of fish each year, as does pollution and habitat destruction. Species are being wiped out before man has had a chance to "discover" them, in places such as Borneo, Africa, and South America. Collecting wild fish might be the only way that some species are preserved for the next generation of hobbyists. In fact many people that are working the hardest in the preservation end of things, are the same people that have been collecting them over the years. One example would be the work that Ad Konings et al have been doing in the Rift Lakes with African Cichlids.
Collecting fish in the wild, and keeping them in a glass box is no more cruel than keeping domestic raised fish in poor conditions. I suspect that millions of LFS specimens are killed each year within the first 30 days, while someone is using live fish to cycle their new pet store purchased aquarium. It's a slow and I would imagine agonizing death for a fish. At least the bleach killed the fish in the video rather quickly. Commercial fishing kills millions of fish each year, as does pollution and habitat destruction. Species are being wiped out before man has had a chance to "discover" them, in places such as Borneo, Africa, and South America. Collecting wild fish might be the only way that some species are preserved for the next generation of hobbyists. In fact many people that are working the hardest in the preservation end of things, are the same people that have been collecting them over the years. One example would be the work that Ad Konings et al have been doing in the Rift Lakes with African Cichlids.
