Well, today's post is going to cover something besides my ponds. As far as those go, the fish are fine, the frogs aren't in sight, and the tadpoles are exercising up a storm, hopefully to get their legs developed in time.

Now for something dreadful that shouldn't have happened. I was with my wife at a store just the other day and we went past the fish displays. Like many stores that sell live tropical fish, they had a selection of bettas. Much as I feel for the poor fish in their individual cups, there's nothing that can be done for that since I can't purchase every one of them to set them free. Besides, that would only encourage the stores to sell more. However, it's not that which bothers me. No, this was caused by a cruel individual who may have entered the store posing as a customer. What I encountered was what looked like on first glance to be a dead betta in a cup. I couldn't help notice how beautiful it was only to have died. Then I realized something else was wrong. There were two bettas in the same cup. It was at that point that I touched the cup to make sure the second betta wasn't a reflection. That was when both suddenly became active as they briefly released each other. The two bettas had been locked onto each other in a state of exhaustion.

Getting over my outrage, I quickly spotted the empty cup beside them and opened the lid after setting that cup on a firm surface. Then I opened the cup with the two fish and poured one into the other cup so that both could recover from their ordeal caused by someone with a cruel streak.

Anyway, store personnel are generally too busy to spot such activities and most don't have anyone who's truly knowledgeable about fish. That's almost always easy to spot since those stores usually have a lot of dead fish floating in their tanks. There's not much we can do about dead fish other than to not purchase from those stores when they don't maintain their tanks properly, but it's a different matter when bettas are concerned. I just hope that we, as customers, can occasionally take a look at those and alert the store manager when we see that someone has been cruel in placing bettas in the same cup so they'll fight. Remember, those bettas have nowhere to run or hide.

My wife has one that swims in a very large glass that's kept on our kitchen table. What's more, he's intelligent. He knows where his food container is at and will point at it when he wants something more to be fed. When the kitchen TV is on, he sometimes watches it. Besides being intelligent, they're beautiful creatures. They deserve proper treatment whether they're in your home or still in a store.