You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!™
Animal Activism for critters that can be flushed down a toilet with a moderate amount of effort and a minimal amount of concern.
If a microbe on a flea is threatened by mankind, someone somewhere stops life as we know it to protect an Eco-system that you couldn’t find with a road map or Green Peace guide.
DATELINE: TACOMA, Wash.
It’s in this city that the weekly gold fish races at a local tavern were canceled.
CANCELLED!
Why cancel an activity that makes me want to patronize this bar right now?
Because bar management received complaints from animal rights activists.
COMPLAINTS ABOUT GOLD FISH SWIMMING. ARE YOU SERIOUS!
According to published reports, every Tuesday night the Harmon Tap Room would feature races in which cheap feeder fish from a pet store were “raced” down two 8-foot troughs. Racers guided the fish with squirt bottles.
Shooting water at fish? That’s like blowing air at a humming bird!
How cruel is cruel? Stop the world, I just want to get off.
According to Bartender Joel Cummings “the fish were cared for when they weren’t racing but occasionally they would pass away.”
After complaints by phone and email, the Harmon Tap Room replaced goldfish racing with beer pong.
BeerPong is a perfectly acceptable alternative, but to cancel goldfish racing because someone else is offended, quite frankly that offends me.
How can you replace something as fecund as goldfish racing? Why would you even consider it?
Gold fish don’t exactly have a long life expectancy. Perhaps this time at the bar and performing for excited crowds was the crowning achievement of an otherwise placid existence for the little guys.
And it’s not like the goldfish were being mistreated. They weren’t being chased by cats. The water wasn’t connected to a sewer system and the fish were presumably being fed before and after the 8 foot race.
8 feet! A fish can swim eight feet with it’s fins tied behind its back.
Mistreated? Get real!
I wish the bar showed a little more backbone and kept racing.
And when you finally break it all down, they’re goldfish. It’s not like they are Pacific Salmon swimming upstream to spawn? They are freaking goldfish. They are the bottom of the food chain. They are one step above algae. They get eaten by everything on earth including drunk frat boys and grizzly bears.
They have brains the size of lint. They swim because that is what they have been doing since they sludged forward from the primordial ooze.
Who the hell would complain that a few gold fish races are endangering a species?
It’s not like we’re throwing kittens into hot ovens. It’s not like we’re juggling hamsters with chain saws. It’s not like dogs are being shot with bb guns and forced to sit at a table and play poker.
These are gold fish. They are swimming. The bar got a great promotional idea and said “Hey do you think people would come and drink more if we let fish swim?”
BRILLIANT!
If only all business models could be so simple.
But then someone with too much time on their hands had to get all concerned about the poor gold fish being abused.
So now the tavern doesn’t buy gold fish. So now more gold fish sit in pet stores in swampy warm buckets of detritus waiting to die a unmerciful death.
At least in the bar, the little goldfish were competitors, placed on a pedestal, like a scaled Secretariat.
Sometimes people, you need to just shut up and worry about your damn self.
I’m sure those animal activists are either too fat or too thin or beat their kids or don’t pay their bills on time.
Take care of your own house Goldfish hugger. Shut up and let the racers race.
Like Darwin said; only the crazy survive.
And that is crazy™