Tag: companion

Here’s Why Trademarked Glowing Fish Aren’t Such a Bright Idea

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Companions, Petitions

Saltwater aquariums, though prized for their glorious colors and living reefs, are a massive undertaking. And the havoc the exotic fish trade wreaks on tropical sea life is no secret. But for people who are itching to adorn their homes with vibrant fish, science came up with an easy solution: fluorescent freshwater fish. And the pet industry lapped it up–but at what cost?

A couple years ago I stumbled upon the GloFish® website–yes, trademark and all–and I was transfixed by the words: “GloFish® fluorescent fish are born brilliant! They are not painted, injected or dyed. They inherit their harmless, lifelong color from their parents. They get their stunning color from a fluorescence gene and are best viewed under a blue light.”

I was floored. It read like an advertisement for a new car. Toying with living beings this way hardly seemed harmless. I needed to know more.

These fish were among the first genetically modified animals to have been made available on a commercial scale. But their journey to pet store shelves was not quite intentional. At the turn of the 21st century, scientists from Singapore were attempting to engineer fish who could glow in the presence of certain environmental toxins as a biomarker for pollutants. They inserted fluorescent jellyfish genes into zebrafish, creating the first iteration of glowing freshwater fish.

The patented technology eventually caught the eye of the company that would ultimately create and trademark the GloFish, available now in zebrafish, tetras, danios, sharks, and barbs. As I write this, the brand is currently marketing its “Mardi Gras collection” on its website, comprising two Moonrise Pink tetras, two Galactic Purple tetras, and two Sunburst Orange tetras, to commemorate the festive occasion.

Video captured at a Virginia Petco store

Despite opposition from groups like the Center for Food Safety, the glowing fish made their way to American store shelves with a stamp of approval from officials who claimed that the captive fish posed no threat to wildlife or the food supply. (And a study later attempted to back that up, documenting that non-GMO male fish out-competed GloFish with female mates, which would eventually lead to the disappearance of the fluorescent trait in a population–should a stray GloFish ever make his way into the natural environment, that is.)

The GloFish line, from a commercial perspective, has been a massive success. The company’s sales now comprise about 10 percent of the entire aquarium industry.

And it’s easy to see why: Many people don’t want the hassle of setting up and maintaining a saltwater aquarium just to enjoy brilliantly colored fish in their living rooms. Freshwater is (relatively) easy. Plus, more and more consumers are becoming aware of the death and destruction caused by the saltwater fish trade, which pulls over 20 million fish from the waters of places like the Philippines and Hawaii every year and results in six fish deaths per live fish sold due to dangerous and cruel capture and shipping methods. And let’s not get started on the extensive coral reef damage.

Breeding fish in a captive, contained environment seemingly circumvents most of those issues.

But I was still left wondering if, throughout these past two decades of tinkering with the genetics of these tiny beings in a lab, anyone ever stopped to consider a fundamental question: What’s in it for the fish themselves? Admittedly, apart from making them the life of a house party, the modification doesn’t seem to inflict any other known physical changes on them. They eat, swim, and live just like regular zebrafish, tetras, and barbs. The process of breeding fish from already modified fish is not inherently invasive (unlike chemically dyeing or injecting inks into fish–two common, but undoubtedly cruel, practices in the aquarium industry that lead to illness and high mortality).

Yet, clearly, fluorescence won’t provide an average tetra with an evolutionary advantage, either. (Imagine a neon orange freshwater fish trying to hide from a predator behind a few strands of seaweed or a pile of grey rocks.)

So are we left with net result of zero in our cost-benefit analysis of GloFish welfare? Not quite.

The moment that Yorktown Technologies, the original company behind the GloFish, entered the picture, this genetic manipulation in the name of science became a gimmick.

The goal: Make the look and feel of saltwater tanks more accessible. Make freshwater fish prettier, more enticing, more consumable. Like a vacuum, a new car, or a frozen burrito, these fish needed to be branded.

The aquarium industry has turned these fishes’ genetics into a commodity that it markets to us as an innovative way to spruce up our home decor. After all, like any industry, it has to churn out fresh products to keep us interested. And, so far, it’s worked: There are over 9 million fish sold by this multi-billion-dollar industry living in American homes, from an endless array of Betta fish varieties to the dainty angelfish and the goldfish brought home after a carnival game victory.

For many years, I was one of the millions of consumers lured in by the appeal of having my very own fish tank. In college, I was gifted with a tetra who looked remarkably like the “Moonrise Pink” variety of GloFish–with one major exception: He didn’t glow.

Miraculously, I loved this fish, whom I named Clapper, just the same, regardless of his slightly less lustrous hue. Clapper traveled with me from dorm room to dorm room, to my first house after graduation, and to my apartment after my relationship with my boyfriend at the time fell apart.

We shared many memories, including one that made my heart skip a beat: Midway through a thorough tank cleaning, I noticed that Clapper was missing from the jug I’d temporarily placed him in. Within a few seconds, I found him–on the floor, wedged between the washing machine and the wall. Somehow, I managed to slowly slide the machine out enough–without crushing the tiny being–and scoop him back into the water before suffocation set in.

I spent every day for months silently apologizing to him. Because I loved him.

I was diligent with his care, and Clapper remained physically healthy up until a couple of days before he passed. He met his expected lifespan of five years–and then some.

Yes, we shared many memories: memories of me crying; memories of me laughing; and, most often, memories of me leaving and coming back again, sometimes with a friend, or a new love, or a new painting.

Every day, though, Clapper stayed there, swimming in circles, silently watching me from behind his glass wall.

I didn’t know the inner toll captivity was taking on this social being for much of his life. I didn’t realize that he was lonely and isolated because tetras need schools to thrive. Or that with only a few artificial plants and rocks to enrich his environment, his life was just a slow, drawn-out death.

Today, most of us have started to question the ethics of confining magnificent mammals like dolphins and whales to the equivalent of a bathtub at marine parks for guests to gawk over. As the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) explains, films like Blackfish have “challenged people to recognize the cruelty of keeping large, intelligent, and sentient animals in such small tanks.” However, AWI continues, fish are also “sentient—showing far more cognitive abilities than they are given credit for—and few, if any, spend their entire lives in the wild in the volume of water contained in a standard fish tank.”

Remember the fish who used a rock as a tool to crack open his meal? Or the pufferfish who builds an intricate sand sculpture to attract a mate? Fish scientist Dr. Culum Brown states that “it would be impossible for fish to survive as the cognitively and behaviorally complex animals they are without a capacity to feel pain.”  The scientific research for fish complexity and sentience abounds, and in 2018, Smithsonian Magazine (finally) declared, “It’s official: Fish feel pain.”

Gaining traction for the notion of fish as individuals worthy of ethical consideration is an uphill battle, though, especially with outfits like Amazon offering up 1-gallon aquariums (a volume infinitely too small to house any fish species long-term) accompanied by descriptions like, “Compact design fits almost anywhere – perfect for dorm, office or home.”

As my fellow animal advocates and I try to rewrite the public discourse on how we ought to think about our relationships with fish, such captions continue hammering home the message: Fish are decorations, trinkets, objects. We don’t maximize their space for their well-being; we minimize it for our convenience.

And, in the case of our genetically engineered friends: We don’t have to settle for dull fish when we can have spectacularly striking GloFish.

It’s time to embrace fish for who, not what, they are. And we can start by letting them keep their natural colors.

 Petition closed with 499 signatures.

The Red-Eyed Rat Who Stole My Heart

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Companions

In 2003, when I was 15, I screen-printed a t-shirt with a photo of my albino rat, Hammy, and paraded it around school. The other kids laughed, but I wasn’t fazed. I’d made a best friend–one who was a whole lot more loyal, and maybe even a little smarter, than my classmates.

It was February 8, 2003, when my mom and I entered a small family-run pet shop and began perusing the aisles. A shy little being with a wide-eyed red gaze soon caught my eye. I glanced down into the tank–a “feeder rat” tank–and that was it. This albino rat absolutely wouldn’t be left for snake food. We left with this rat, trembling in a little brown box, with its naked pink tail wrapped around its small white body. The young rat was endowed with the name Hamilton–soon shortened to Hammy when I discovered she was not a little boy, but a little girl.

My mom and I noticed pretty quickly that Hammy wasn’t healthy. She had sniffles and diarrhea and struggled to breathe. But we worked hard to nurse her to health, and in a few days’ time, she traded her fearful warning nips for loving nibbles. And by March, she’d transformed into a bouncing mischief-maker who had a knack for investigating, well, everything. There was the time I found her hunched over a box of clay red-handed, literally: She’d been snacking on the crimson earth, leaving her tiny nose and fingers stained. And then there was the day she finally surmounted my wall of shelves, like Everest, triumphing over board games and puzzles as she summited Monopoly, way up near the ceiling.

Hammy became my best friend, in those few months. And I may have been hers, too, were it not for her partner in crime, Hallie, who joined our rat pack that spring and followed Hammy wherever she went. Hallie was her sidekick, always up for adventures–and trouble.

When I came in my office–“the rat room”–each evening to study, all I had to do was call. If I called for Hallie, Hallie came running–but Hammy couldn’t be distracted from the task at hand. Only once I said her name would she come racing down from between the slinkies and Rubix cubes. Then she’d leap across the floor and scale my leg to my lap in record time. There, she’d push her nose into my hand, demanding some serious petting time. She knew when the time was right.

The world, that room, was Hammy’s to conquer. And at the end of the day, the world would know it belonged to her, as she left her mark where it mattered, as a tiny trail of pee droplets.

But the days of Hammy streaking across the floor with 8″ by 10″ sheets of paper (usually old homework assignments and quizzes) in tow came to a harrowing end in mid-June that year. One night, she was suddenly lethargic and had lost her appetite for food and water, an appetite that had once driven her to stand on her hind legs or spin in circles for tasty morsels.

At the vet’s office, we learned that Hammy was most likely suffering from Mycoplasma pulmonis, a common ratty respiratory disease. Then I remembered that illness back in February, when we’d first brought her home. She’d had it all along, lying dormant, waiting for the perfect moment to erupt back into her life–our lives.

So, Hammy had Myco, a disease for which there is no cure, a disease that stays in a rat’s body forever. A disease that I never would have predicted would come back to haunt her… to haunt me. Maybe she’d gotten it from dirty bedding in the pet store. Maybe it was even earlier, at the breeder, where rats are churned out like an assembly line of plastic dolls. Apparently, most rats carry it in the pet trade. But not all succumb to it. It seemed a cruel twist of fate.

The vet injected fluid under Hammy’s skin, much to her displeasure, and we took her home with Baytril, a pink medicine we were to give her orally twice a day.

But the following day, she had not improved in condition. As I was picking her up, petting her, trying to force a little food into her mouth and into that withering body, I noticed a little red bug on her fur: a louse. Hammy had lice. That was easy to understand: With a suppressed immune system, she was an easy target.

And I, just a teenager who’d spent countless hours with this tiny soul by my side, agonizing over history essays as she scampered over my back and burrowed up my sleeves–I was in a panic. The Myco was consuming her. I felt powerless.

Back to the vet, where Hammy weighed in at 270 grams. The same as the previous day. But she still seemed so thin, so weak. They told us they’d work their hardest to make her better, but she’d have to stay with them overnight in an oxygen tank. That way, she could breathe more easily, and they could try to get her to eat.

It was a big decision to make. I knew that if she died, she’d be alone, without me. I wanted her to be with me if–when she died. But I knew that they could do a much better job than I was equipped to do. I walked out of the vet’s office that day with tears running down my face, hoping to the powers-that-be that she would live to see more days, to explore more fields of paper and plastic wrappers.

On the drive home, I thought to myself, Never again will I buy a rat from a pet store. I had bought Hammy to save her from becoming snake bait, to prevent her suffering, to give her a new life. And she had become a happy rat, in those few cherished months we’d spent together.

But what of her replacement in that pet store tank?

I slept lightly, uneasily. On the morning of June 19, I woke up to my dad knocking on my bedroom door.

“The vet called this morning,” he said softly. “It looks like the rat… the little Hammy rat… she didn’t make it through the night.”

Today, half my life later, that little pet shop is long gone. I don’t know what became of it, or where all the animals went. It’s been many years since I’ve felt the pitter-patter of Hammy’s little hands and feet on my skin, and many animal companions have come and gone. But I still feel her little footprints on my heart, and every so often, I hear her dragging an old math assignment across the floor.