Go Fish! The lush, the fish and the flush

For people who live in apartment buildings where successive years of poodle crap in the elevators and the enduring smell of cat piss in closed spaces with poor air circulation has resulted in a ban on all four-legged pets, the choice for animal companionship most typically falls between a fish and a bird (or a snake if you’re a lone male with a love of tattoos and skateboarding videos).

The latter option poses a problem for those in high-rise buildings – your balcony giving the creature a head start when it chooses to fly the coop while you’re vacuuming excrement out of its cage – and, besides, despite what that wily pet store owner might have had you believe, your average cockatoo can’t be counted on to sing a few verses of “Margaritaville” to entertain dinner guests upon a snap of the fingers. And if you’re in a house when Polly croaks its last tune, it will likely be dug out of the yard by the neighbour’s cat if the thing is too big to sink down the commode.

Fish make for easier pets to maintain, partly because they require about as much interaction as your average Nevada shrubbery. What’s more, they make for ideal teaching tools for your offspring who are lower down on the Piaget development scale, giving them both a sense of responsibility and, when they utterly fail to live up to that responsibility and the fish dies of neglect in a filthy tank, a life lesson in the fleeting nature of existence, as you stand together on the side of the porcelain bowl and hum the “Ave Maria” before flushing Phil the Gill to his great reward. (That is unless it is one of the more exotic varieties and can be turned into a fillet when the kids are over at the neighbours’.)

An 18-year-old in Brisbane, Australia recently ransacked the home of a vacationing woman, and conducted just such a ritual, but prior to receiving the belly-up notice that usually precedes it. From the reports on the story, the man, who was, of course, walleyed drunk at the time of the raid, did not steal anything, smashing a Sony Playstation console and ripping out the woman’s telephone from her wall. But, in a bizarre flourish at the raid’s end reminiscent of the man who bit off a duck's head in a drunken rage last month, the man dipped into the woman’s aquarium, scooped all of her exotic fish and flushed them down the toilet.

The presiding judge in the case was aghast. "Some may find that humorous," she said, correctly, continuing “I don't. I find it a bit sick and obviously distressing to the owners". Indeed, the judge was so taken aback by the man’s actions that she felt it necessary to stick in a final jab by saying “he’s also an unattractive human being”. As we are guessing that in general the most beautiful of Australia’s people are not the ones being paraded in the courts on charges relating to drunken raids, this comment seems as unnecessary as the fatal flush itself.

The fish flusher, a father of two who have our sympathies, was said to be in no position to pay a fine and was given a year of community service and told to receive treatment for his alcohol problem. (Full story here)