Killing my fish.

[pen_grunt]

I think it's reached the point where I have to kill two of our fish. Why, oh why, does someone like me (who stresses out about the health of things so readily) have delicate, swimmy, slimy fish? I'll never know.

One of our sick fish is known to us as "Scoliosa-fish" because he's a mean, mean Danio who developed some kind of spine-bending fish scoliosis early on. He's survived through it for over a year, and he terrorizes the other fish. It's come to our attention recently that he's been having more and more trouble swimming. His "breathing" is very labored, and he rests sideways on things for a long period of time. Sometimes he works up the energy to swim for food, most of the time not. His side appears to be bleeding some of the time.

It's clear that he's suffering. We need to kill him. Our previous strategy has been, "He's going to die soon, so let's just wait for that." This now seems cruel because he's a tough li'l fish, and he's not going down without a fight. Watching anything die, no matter how small and fishy it is, is a tough, tough thing.

The second fish is one of the many inbreeding-whorish platys that we have. It's the adult (but not the biggest, oldest adult) and it has dropsy in advanced stages (it's scales are now sticking straight out instead of smoothly on its sides). He's not acting too sick yet, but he eats less, looks puffy and fuzzy, and most online fish sources agree that this is far beyond the stage of treatment--and he will die soon whatever we do.

I hate finding dead fish in the tank. I have an unnatural fear of dead fish. I dream about dead fish in my dead-fish-anxiety dreams.

This article suggests ways for fish euthanasia: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/faustus/nicoldaquaria/euthanasia.htm

Somehow, I can't imagine myself doing any of these things. Particularly sticking a fish in a blender...or boiling water. Because OMG, it's a living thing, I'm not going to BLEND it. This whole euthanasia thing looks like a job for Derrick.

Anyone ever had to perform fish euthanasia before? How do you do it?

Comments

Here's an idea

[purplesquirrel.livejournal.com]

Re: Here's an idea

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

Nooo! I couldn't do it (flushing the still-alive fish, OR feeding them to the kitties). That, and in the case of the latter I'd be worried about our kitties getting sick from eating sick fish. It's unfair of me, but our cats rank way, way above the swimmy slimy things.

Re: Here's an idea

[sarcasma.livejournal.com]

The near-frozen water method sounded the least horrifying, to me. Fast, non-violent, minimal period of terror, minimal pain. Maybe?

Re: Here's an idea

[sarcasma.livejournal.com]

Sorry, this was just meant to be an out-in-the-open standalone comment, not some kind of rebuttal to the cute cat toilet pic. :)

Re: Here's an idea

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

I think, because I'm paranoid about the fish not dying after whatever I do to it, I'm going to add some alcohol to the water too...that would be an anesthetic, right?

Re: Here's an idea

[sarcasma.livejournal.com]

I couldn't help but wonder if the alcohol would burn and be really painful when they talked about using it alone, but combined with the freezing water, surely that's about as humane as you can get. As for the fish not dying, you do so much work to make sure their water is the right temperature and pH and stuff -- SURELY alcohol-laced, frozen water would be instant death?

I agree with what someone else said, though -- the more I think about this, the more it's like fish are freaking invincible.

[marciamarcia.livejournal.com]

I have no clue how you'd provide a fish with a humane at-home death.

Could you put them in a separate bowl and then break up a valium in their fish food?

I'm raking my brain here, but it's suddenly like fish are invincible or something. Teeny little guillotines? No...

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

Ahh, if only I had valium lying about...that seems humane and painless.

[llythefaerye.livejournal.com]

The amusing/disturbing thing about this to me is that I can picture you doing the research to find this (quite disturbing) article . . .

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

Well, my first instinct was "flush it down the toilet" which is, as the article points out, not even remotely humane--though it would be easier to deal with than actually watching the fish die...

[lisa-e-is-me.livejournal.com]

Oh, no. I really feel for you. We had a fish tank for about 4 years, and we constantly asked ourselves why we kept putting ourselves through it. Every fish we lost broke our hearts, and like you, I often wondered if we should have put the sick ones out of their misery, but we never could bring ourselves to do it. I did come close to just netting one out of the water and letting it die in the air, thinking even though it still wasn't going to be fun, it would at least be faster, but in the end, I just sat there and watched it slowly die, and was miserable about it. We finally just decided to not add any more fish, and when the last one finally went, we broke down the tank, and will never have another one.

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

I do this thing where I've sort of avoided looking directly into the tank when I feed the fishes. I also implore Derrick to go "check on the fish" every once and a while. I'm such a fish-death coward, it's not even funny.

I would like to say that we will be having no more fish, but as of this morning about 4 new babies were swimming in the tank. We seem to have a genuine life-cycle self-sustaining thing going on in our tank here. That, and the adults are refusing to eat the babies like they should be doing.

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

Before reading the article, I was thinking that you should drop them into some high-alcohol content liquor. It's a little expensive, but it's the most humane way I can think of. Go get yourself some Bacardi 151 or something, fill up a small glass with it, and drop the fish in. Problem solved.

[pen-grunt.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if I can get up the guts to do this tonight, I think that's my method of choice. I might chill the liquor to a super-cold temp first, just to be sure that it does the trick.

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't worry, it'll work just fine on its own. Ethanol is a pretty potent neurotoxin. When I was at Arizona, we used to kill roaches in our lab by squirting them with 75% ethanol. Works like a charm.