Some fish keepers are stupid

[rdd1952]

The moment someone boasts about how long they have kept fish I am naturally curious as to why they have said that.

[snapback]913417[/snapback]​

usually once they start to boast about that, there's no reasoning with them.

[snapback]913623[/snapback]​

Ain't it the truth. I have worked in around construction and building materials all my life. Anytime I run into a contractor and a discussion starts about how to do something or whether you can or can't do it I always hate to hear the words "I've been doing this for xx years and". I know at that point that there is no reasoning with them and I may as well give. A disaster is about to take place.

 

[rdd1952]

There are seemingly magic products for sale that will supposedly give you a perfect tank in an instant

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We've all heard the saying "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is". It applys to everything in life including these miracle cycling products although I do think there is probably some credibility to Bio-Spira. I do want to try that just to confirm or repute the reports I have heard.

 

[jflowers]

Agree 100% CFC. I have said to people I know "No you can't keep that in a xxGallon tank" and they have just got it anyway.

To others, CFC is a grump and thats just CFC, don't take it personally LOL. A moderator that is human, gosh what a shock!

Jon

 

[Kanake]

First AaronD your my HERO

Boy! Let me see if I can make a really biger A** of my self. I hope you will still help me when I need help....because.....
I have had my cattery for many years, I have shown my cats and have many Champions. My kittens go home with contracts. I help my people at all hours of the day and night. I stay up with moms and hold there paws. This list goes on and on. BUT I TRULY THOUGHT I COULD JUST FEED THE FISH AND GO ABOUT MY BUSSINESS.
Well I was wrong and youu all have helped. This to me is why this forum was started we just think that if there is a picture of twenty fish swimming in a 10gal aquarium that must be ok. This is a true hobby and just as in the cat and dog world we all stared out newbes we ,you are the teachers and if you have to repeat yours selves untill your blue in the face that is your job because this is your passion. Educate us, help us! If you have knowage repeat, repeat, repeat. If we didn't take our children by the hand and help them learn to walk who do we blame then?
Sorry for my out burst.

 

[John_Nicholson]

"This is a true hobby and just as in the cat and dog world we all stared out newbes we ,you are the teachers and if you have to repeat yours selves untill your blue in the face that is your job because this is your passion. Educate us, help us! If you have knowage"

It is not my job as a successful fish keeper/breeder to educate anyone. It is your job to educate yourself. If you are interested in buying fish from someone and you ask them questions then they should answer them, but that is the extent of that.

-john

 

[OohFeeshy]

The moment someone boasts about how long they have kept fish I am naturally curious as to why they have said that.

[snapback]913417[/snapback]​

usually once they start to boast about that, there's no reasoning with them.

[snapback]913623[/snapback]​

Ain't it the truth. I have worked in around construction and building materials all my life. Anytime I run into a contractor and a discussion starts about how to do something or whether you can or can't do it I always hate to hear the words "I've been doing this for xx years and". I know at that point that there is no reasoning with them and I may as well give. A disaster is about to take place.

[snapback]913722[/snapback]​

Sure is. One of the things I do in my spare time (yep, waaaay to much, I get bored easily) is send messages to people on Ebay selling, say, (and this is true ) a 60l biorb with 25 fish. 15 or so of which are common goldfish, 5 fancy goldfish and 5 danios (or WCMM, not sure which), kindly telling them they have too many fish, a few facts and requesting they put something in the info about the buyer should have a pond, larger tank or rehome the fish. The reply? Usually saying they've been keeping fish for x years. Which is a lie. I had someone pull that line on me, they didn't even know what the two hideously too big fish for the tank were. They didn't even know they were goldfish

 

[Boxcar Muzzdogg]

The point I'm trying to make is even if you do research, it is still very difficult to ascertain what is right, tried tested and proven against what may have worked for somebody else. Just because somebody on a forum has 1600 post ( .... not a reference to anyone in particular ) they may be a fourteen year old fish keeper. Not wanting to be rude, but I would be slightly sceptical about any kind of advice from a fourteen year old - even if they had been keeping fish for 4 years? Sure, I would listen to what they have to say, but wouldn't go off and blindly follow their advice.

Wether or not its difficult to ascertain what is right should not be a question. Its been that way since the beginning of time. Thats what research is for. It also helps to have critical thinking skills, which of course do not get taught in most schools because then people would have the ability to fend for themselves instead of having to enslave themselves to business and government.

As for not trusting 14 year olds, I have read several reputable aquarist publications with articles that were actually written by kids that were 14 and sometimes even younger. Age doesn't matter. Some of the dumbest people in the world have been around for a long time. I once had some jerk tell me that pit bulls are vicious animals that are all about killing and thats all they know how to do, and that I couldn't possibly know what I was tlaking about because he had raised "fighting dogs" for 40 years, before I was "a gleam in my daddy's eye." Older does not equal wiser. Thats the purpose of critical thinking skills. They exist so that one can determine which information they are getting is correct and how much to question it, instead of relying on labels such as how old someone is or whether they work at an lfs or not.

 

[jflowers]

Older here sometimes = less informed, wanted to say stupid but not brave enough. I think i have it sussed and my eleven year old too. Anyone we try to "inform" ignores anything we say. tropical fish keeping is owned by the LFS, IME you would have to be respected in other ways to over rule someones decision concerning tropical fish.

I have tried advising and found that peeps will do as they like, I can then tell them that thier goldfish will die in two years instead of 15. 15 years that they would enjoy in a pond, but peeps dont listen.

Jon

 

[John_Nicholson]

I know what you mean about those pits......LOL.

-john

 

[rdd1952]

Older here sometimes = less informed, wanted to say stupid but not brave enough.

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Hey, I resemble that remark. Seriously, I don't worry about age too much when I read a reply. I applaud the younger, very knowledgable members of this forum such as OohFeeshy, Dwarfs and dwarf_dude to name a few (apologies to the others but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment). They know their fish even if they are snot-nosed little brats (just kidding about the s-n brat part).

This is off the topic of knowledge in fishkeeping and LFSs but I think young people that keep fish responsibly, and I emphasis that, is great experience for later in life when they will be parents, husbands and wives, employees/employers, etc. They are learning responsibility which, unfortunately, a lot of the youth today never learn. Hats off to you.

 

[RandomWiktor]

I'd have to agree with CFC, even though I've done this before. Yes, the owners of fish stores should have to know enough about fish to at least tell someone a Goldfish can't be in a bowl, and a CAE might eat your other fish's eyes off, but frankly, when you buy an animal - the responsibility for knowing about its proper care rests on YOU. You can't believe everything you read or hear, but if you take the effort to look up several sites or flip through several books on the the species you are getting, you should be able to come to a general agreement about how an animal is supposed to be cared for. Hearsay and rumor is not enough; you need to do research, because if that animal suffers and dies out of your incompetance, no one can be blamed but yourself. I don't care if the woman in cart with the lazy eye at Wallmart said bettas eat plants. I don't care if Jarek the 16 year old at Petsmart said you can keep 5 goldfish in a 1/2 gallon bowl. I don't care if your uncle's friend's boyfriend said that CAEs are awesome community fish. People tend to be morons; if you haven't figured this out yet, you haven't been living long enough. Always double, triple, quadruple check. This is not the olden days where we are isolated from information and the tools to properly care for animals. You can flip on the internet, go to the library, or sit down with a book and coffee in Barnes and Noble and find out everything you need to know - and probably a lot you don't need to know - about virtually any aspect of aquarium and fish care. Then you can use ebay, aquabid, the internet, and the numerous fish and pet stores around to get everything you could possibily need. You can even buy plants from the country your fish is from, water conditioners that make the water mimic its habitat conditions, and other fish that share a similar ecosystem. These aren't the days of glass bowls and carnival fish!
So yes - though we all make mistakes - the responsibility for our fish lies on ourselves. I think it is perfectly appropriate to gripe about pet stores and wallmart with the hope that one day, management will LISTEN and insist on better training or care sheets. But if you just blindly listened to hearsay or the instructions of someone trained to make money off of you... don't come complaining; you had it coming.

 

[yvez9]

Can I add that people who buy a car don't do massive search on the internet before buying it. Same goes for a house. Who will fetch technical information about a house's structure, it's water system and so on....

People will go to a store and buy a nice little 20 gallon Hagen aquarium (as I did) and then find in the box a nice VHS tape and a little 10 page booklet with beginner's instructions. In the booklet, it will say what LFS people say: Let it run for a few days, bring it up to temp, make sure everything is ok and then put "Cycle" in it and buy fish.

If you buy a car, you'll maintain it like the owner's manual suggests and seldom more.

These instruction manuals have the same purpose, let you run your purchase with minimal trouble, just enough to not discourage you and keep coming back to the dealer to buy more stuff...

If you buy a bag of Kraft Diner at the store, the recipe says you need Kraft margarine to mix it well... Everyone knows margarine is margarine and any brand will do, but not everyone knows this about cars or fish tanks...

 

[RandomWiktor]

Um.... are you trying to say that its ok to not research the proper care of a living thing because you don't read up much on the care on inanimate objects? I really don't understand what you were trying to say with that digression from the topic of fish.

At the end of the day, if a car breaks down, it may or not be caused by the way you used it, but you can bring it to a mechanic and get it fixed, or you can get rid of it. It might be dissapointing, it didn't die from inhaling its own waste for weeks because you didn't look up the history of your used car and find out that it had alignment issues. Nor will the macoroni and cheese eat one another alive if you put the wrong margarin in. And while your house might get a fixable hole in the wall because you didn't read into how much weight it could hold, it probably won't dry out and die on the floor.

That all sounded very silly, buy what I am trying to say is - the difference in researching or just using the owner's manual of an inanimate object and a living thing is that, when you goof up with living things, they suffer immensely, then die. So I don't feel the two are comparable, nor should people think that if it is "ok" to slack on researching one thing, it is ok to slack on researching all things.

 

[yvez9]

what i was trying to say is people expect good tips from someone who sells them something.

It's not up to everyone to do research on something they want to buy...
They expect good information from the salesperson and the manufacturer. I'm not saying its normal for people not to research. Just saying people will take advice from someone who is in poistion to give out advice.

Then again, there are those septics who say; "my dad had fish in a bowl when i was a kid and it lived for as long as i can remember" and they won't hear anything about treating water, cycling and all that.

Yes, some people are dumb, but some trust people they shouldn't because they don't know better.

Again, if you buy something you have no knowledge about, say a new lighting fixture for the living room, now unless you're an electrician, will you go on the internet and find out exactly what's the best way to wire it and find the best bulbs for this pârticular lighting device? Or will you just take the salesperson's word, or follow the instructions provided with it, and do it that way?

Some people will do the research, most won't.

You can't always blame someone for taking advice from the fish guy at the store and end up with sick or dead fish.

The really stupid people are those who are given good advice and don't follow it because they don't think it's good.

to add to the "living" vs "inanimate" topic, people who buy an aquarium and don't search up on it just want to lighten up the bedroom or something, and it is stupid to buy living creatures for the sole purpose of entertainment. Hey, my fish entertain me, but i take care of them, as much as i take care of my dog! Those people are stupid too...

 

[colen]

Time and time again we read the same old topics "Walmart employee's know nothing" "the staff at pet co. know less than the wart on my little brothers nose" "the guy at the lfs says bala sharks can go in a 10g tank with 300 goldfish" etc etc.

But wait!!!!

Here we are in the middle of the information age where anyone can find out anything they want to know within a few hours if not minutes. Fish keeping isnt rocket science and everything you need to know can be learnt from a book or by running a search on the internet in very little time. Those of us who do know a bit about fish weren't born with that knowledge, we learnt it by reading about it and yet time after time we hear people going on about how their lfs have missold them fish or that the guy in Walmart didnt pre warn them that a oscar would outgrow the 10g tank he sold them with it. Anybody who is able to get to a lfs is also able to get to a book store or library and lets face it not many people just walk past a fish store and think "hey, i think i'll go in and buy a tank and some fish", deciding to keep fish is a pre meditated act so there is no excuse for not at least buying a beginers guide to keeping fish type book before buying a tank.
It is a sad fact that many fish stores employ staff that know nothing about the fish they are selling, but the fish keeping business like nearly all hobby style businesses isnt one that makes a huge deal of money, infact you could say that the people who work there do it either out of love of the hobby or because they can't get a job elsewhere so it stands to reason that to come across a intellegent lfs employee is a pleasurable but rare experience. So next time you hear someone handing out bad advise dont just blame the staff, the person with the money in their hand is just as bad and if not worse than the person doing the selling.


Right i've finished so you can all flame me now

Hmmm...

Those of us who do know a bit about fish weren't born with that knowledge, we learnt it by reading about it

Many of us have made mistakes in this hobby, I'm sure a lot of people on this forum have. People learn from there mistakes and not just from what a book says/reading/researching. How many of you can 100% honestly say they have never made any mistakes in the hobby? Exactly.

yet time after time we hear people going on about how their lfs have missold them fish or that the guy in Walmart didnt pre warn them that a oscar would outgrow the 10g tank he sold them with it.

They complain because they are new to the hobby and do not know any better.

It is a sad fact that many fish stores employ staff that know nothing about the fish they are selling, but the fish keeping business like nearly all hobby style businesses isnt one that makes a huge deal of money, infact you could say that the people who work there do it either out of love of the hobby or because they can't get a job elsewhere so it stands to reason that to come across a intellegent lfs employee is a pleasurable but rare experience.

Your right on with this one, you get what you pay for. Although, if the guy working at my LFS was being paid well I would be paying a lot more for my fish - no thank you...