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Comment by LesZedCB | Hacker News Reader

Here's a nice video[1] of somebody adopting a supermarket lobster and nurturing it back to health. clear demonstration to me that they are sentient and have personalities and mood (of a sort). after watching that, the grocery store lobsters are kinda heartbreaking, but i'm also a long time vegetarian so already predisposed to that.

i think aquarium keepers can be especially attuned to the personality types of marine animals. i've only been keeping freshwater fish and snails for under a year but they are super personable!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sI7WveN7vk

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My partner works at an aquarium and the amount of personality that fish & marine animals have is incredible!

A lot of fish love sand/gravel baths. So when they spot a diver in the tank they’ll either look for food or wait for when to sprinkle sand/gravel overhead.

If you own an aquarium at home you can also begin to learn the personality of your tank critters. (I also define personality in animals as “different” from personality in humans. They are not equivalent, but individual animals still have unique behaviors that separate them from others in their species)

If you use Instagram, try and follow your local ZAA/AZA accredited aquarium or zoo. They often share clips of unique behavior & can often be pretty educational.

Please take this as an honest question: as a vegetarian and someone with likely above average empathy for animals, don't you feel uneasy about keeping fish in acquariums?

I eat meat so I'm not claiming any moral ground, on the contrary I very much keep in high esteem people who avoid animal products, but the idea of keeping a living creature in a tiny living space feels incredibly sad to me, and it seems surprising that someone like you would do it.

Konrad Lorenz discusses this in Solomon's Ring. He says that it's fine to cage animals that have limited territory in nature. Thankfully, many reef fish, like clown fish, have limited ranges in nature, so thrive in tanks.

I’ve inherited a canary someone didn’t want, and I feel very much the same. I’ve considered letting it go, but it’s not a strong flier and the climate where I am isn’t exactly canary friendly. The idea that anyone would /buy/ a bird just to keep them in a cage is depressing.

The same thought applies to mice and other little mammals like sugar fliers, reptiles and amphibians, etc. I’ve cats and dogs that I adore, so I’m not anti-pet exactly, but if you take a step back and really look, the whole idea of pets is…not right.

Birds can be happy living with humans. As with other pets, they need stimulation and they are social animals. Ensure they have enough time outside the cage. On YouTube are many examples of birds living happily with humans.

I'd expect that birds that grew up in a cage will just starve if you let them go.

haha yeah, i've been conflicted about it since starting, and still am.

partly i have moved past the black and white moralization of it, into something that's more of a heuristic of minimization in order to guide me through the more grey parts of life. pets is a really really hard one for me, because i share your intuition, it's not kind to restrict their freedom, but i also enjoy that bond with them.

ultimately, i don't have a reason more than it's just one of the places in my life that brings me a lot of joy. my family and i can't have kids or a dog or anything, but i love having animals around. the bird feeders are another daily enjoyment of mine. the fish are really beautiful and i take the best care of them i can. there are very few of them in a quite large tank, but yes i also get a weird sad feeling while watching them pretty frequently...

thanks for asking though, it's a good thing to continually re-evaluate. i don't know if it's something that i can indulge in long term.

Thank you very much for your answer!

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