The Real Reason We Keep Tropical Fish

There are a lot of ways to think about this hobby, but there's one aspect to it that I have had and I believe many of you have had for as long as you've had fish. I call it the burn. You see a fish in a shop and the burn sets in. You have to have that fish. The burn. It's an excitement. It's a celebration. It's a joy. It's an all-encompassing emotion. emotion that takes over and drives you, almost like an ambition, to acquire, to maintain, and if possible, to breed that fish. Why do you keep them? Some people say it's playing God. I don't think so. I think it's exactly what God gave us fish for, not to play him, but to play with companions it's not quite like having a dog or a cat but it is accepting the responsibility for maintaining the happiness and the health of a living animal to be able to watch it to observe it to interact with it to be able to treat it well not as a friend exactly but certainly as a kind of a little brother or little sister. As somebody you care for and take care of and want to be happy and want to be healthy. I believe that keeping tropical fish is a life skill. It's something we learn to do because it's important to do. It's important to be able to provide the kind of nurturing environment that makes it possible for little creatures to grow and thrive. I cannot tell you how many children come into my shop and become thrilled and ecstatic about fish. They acquire them, they learn to take care of them, and over the years they become really really good at it. Now many of them once they marry, start acquiring other kinds of animals. They learn to care for hamsters and rabbits and snakes and fish and turtles and all sorts of critters until there's a pregnancy and then until there's a baby. And when that happens, most of those charges come back to live in my shop and I find new young people to care for them. The person who as a child learned to care for other animals is now caring for other people, caring for babies, for children. They've become a nurturing person and as soon as their children are old enough, back to the fish tank. It's a way of sharing that quality of life with their children, that special skill, that life skill that's so vital to learn to care, to learn to provide healthy, happy, growing, thriving environment for other living things. Why do you do it? Because It's in your nature. It's in your nature to care. And not just to care as an abstract sensation of feeling, an attitude, but as a behavior, as something you actually do. Not as an idea or a concept, but as an experience. As something that fills your life with a meaning and a value and a joy and the celebration that makes your life something more than it would have been. So keep your fish, keep them happy, keep them healthy, and keep them in a spirit of love, and you will be rewarded a thousandfold. This is Father Fish preaching at you one more time.