Someone who knows my wife won a goldfish. A goldfish was a prize for something. A strange, lonesome life in a small glass cube. That person asked my wife to watch the goldfish while she (the person) was away during spring break. My wife brought the fish in, & set it in the middle of the dining room table.
We live in a house full of cats. There are four of them. Immediately I felt anxious for the poor goldfish. My wife decided to cover the cube of water with some foil, with a couple of holes for air, but it bothered me even more. (Probably irrationally - I've never owned a fish, & I didn't know if covering a cubic bowl with holey foil was safe.) (But I didn't look it up on the net or anything.) (Sometimes I think I get a little high on my anxiety & don't necessarily want it to be suddenly cured.)
I told my wife for safety we might put the fish in a spare room. By itself. My wife, as unfamiliar with owning a fish as I was, worried she might forget to feed the fish, & so, while she agreed to put the goldfish somewhere safe, she did write on our refrigerator whiteboard, "FISH! FISH! FISH!"
The fish found itself sitting on a bookcase next to a window by itself in a spare room with the door closed. Which also made me very sad. The fish by itself in a cube-shaped container (with a large plastic fish as its only companion) on a table in a busy house bothered me. The fish in the room by itself bothered me.
The wife & I were about to go to Atlanta, & we had a person coming out to feed the cats. She's a professional pet sitter but did that include fish? Fish hidden in a spare room?
Our sweet neighbors - who also have a lovely beagle girl - agreed to watch the fish, & out of sight was out of mind. Until I dreamt about the fish this morning.
Look, although I am vegan, & firmly believe in the rights of animals not to be abused by humans, I'm not against keeping them as pets. (I have four cats & three dogs, you know.) In the case of dogs, suddenly abandoning them would be absurd - they have co-evolved with us for millennia. Cats are slightly different, because they're only a bit less feral when they're with humans, but I'm on the "better in here with us versus outside in the elements" side of the keeping them healthy & happy argument*. My cats, even if they don't know, are much happier inside than the alternative.
But I get sad when I see a lonely dog in a backyard, completely ignored by the humans who own it. Dogs want & need to be with humans &/or other dogs. When our sweet neighbors adopted the beagle girl, they brought her into a home already comfortably filled two other dogs. She was immediately so happy - she knew that she had found her forever pack.
Maybe the goldfish in the cubic bowl wouldn't have bothered me so much if it had had a goldfish companion. After all, it's probably safer (to use my cat argument) in that small space than in the wild, where it might be lunch for a bigger fish, or one of those poor, doomed feral cats. Yet something felt wrong, & caused me inner turmoil, to see it so solitary in such a small space.
I am thinking of going to a therapist. Not because of this, this just happened as I was considering the idea. But you know that this goldfish story would be a lengthy conversation.
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* As I wrote this line, it began to rain outside.
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