Weekender
Our child wanted a fish. We acquiesced. How hard could it be house a tropical underwater being in the dead of winter in the Pacific Northwest? Photo by Jackie Wong.
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Photo Essays

Are Household Pets a Human Flaw, or an Act of Hope?

Life lessons from a three-gallon tank.

A betta fish in silhouette in a small fish tank backlit with a purple light. The tank contains artificial plants in red on the left, and green on the right. A grey rock is in the foreground.
Our child wanted a fish. We acquiesced. How hard could it be house a tropical underwater being in the dead of winter in the Pacific Northwest? Photo by Jackie Wong.
Jackie Wong 17 Jan 2025The Tyee

Jackie Wong is a senior editor at The Tyee.

On Monday morning at 6:50 a.m., my seven-year-old son stood in the dark on a stack of books, inspecting the fish tank on a chest of drawers.

An honest question. “Has Fishy Fish always looked like that?”

I turned on a lamp and stepped closer. The betta fish seemed different than the night before. Something had changed about the lush, ribbony tips of his fins.

I opened my laptop and typed what I saw into the search bar on my browser. Could this be the beginning of the end already? We’d only had him a few weeks and know he will die of course, but like anyone housing an animal companion, I thought we had more time.

Google told me it was likely fin rot, a bacterial infection common to aquarium fish, which can be caused by poor water quality. Unfortunate, but treatable.

I didn’t exactly sign up for this, but I did it to myself. For animals and children, it works the same way: you fall in love with them all at once and for no reason, and then you let logic slide away.

Two sets of artificial aquarium plants against a blue background underwater. On the left is a plant with thick purplish leaves; on the right is a plant with longer, sometimes spirally green ones.
Photo by Jackie Wong.

In their 2024 book Oh My Friends, There Is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology, Vancouver authors Am Johal and Matt Hern spend two chapters on the intricacies of human-animal friendships, connections that are “are constantly shaping and reshaping our lives and histories.” There’s valuable, if challenging, potential in making space for those bonds to change us, they say.

“Which of us — of any species anywhere — are not constantly making compromises to maintain certain relationships?” Hern and Johal ask.

“Which of us enters into completely voluntary, consensual or mutualistic encounters with anyone else, without any impositions on our decision-making?

“It is a consumptive fantasia of unfettered ‘choice’ to imagine that any of our lives are like shoe-shopping on the internet with a seemingly endless array of possible options. We are always constrained and impelled, and thankfully so.”

Those last lines have stayed with me. Being constrained, yet impelled. Perpetually feeling the squeeze of encroachment, of being a little too imposed-upon. Some may read this as a constant source of irritation, a threat to our hard-earned, ever-elusive peace of mind and above all, solitude.

But maybe there’s another way of looking at this. A way of countering the fact that we live in a neoliberal society bolstered by the shaky, digital-era promise that it’s possible, even desirable, to optimize every facet of our lives and therefore free ourselves from the constraints and impositions that might otherwise stand in the way of a frictionless existence.

This is why I said yes to the fish. I knew that caring for the little guy wouldn’t come easily to me. I’m already too busy and it would probably be annoying, on top of all the basic aquatic chemistry I barely understand.

Our early experiences don’t paint a full picture of who we are, but I squeaked by in high school math with a long streak of C minuses. I scored 44 per cent on the Biology 12 provincial exam and made it into a post-secondary liberal arts program by the skin of my teeth.

As we circled the pet store with our child, who had become suddenly enraptured by the idea of an underwater companion, my spouse was skeptical about my pledge to take on the care of the fish.

He correctly believed the work would fall to him, because in our household, we play to our strengths.

He is skilled at and therefore responsible for things that require a person to be calmly reliable, methodical and consistent. Like being the only person in the family who remembers to water the plants, do the laundry, and administer measured doses of fish-flavoured blood thinners to our cat at timed intervals throughout the day. He is better with numbers, spreadsheets and updating shared online calendars than I will ever be.

To his chagrin, I let my emotions guide how hard I’ll work at cleaning the bathroom that day, what I’ll buy at the grocery store and what I might cook. Sometimes I forget to do what I said I’d do because I changed my mind at the last minute or bumped into a friend on the street.

I like to think that my love of people and my embrace of big ideas makes up for some of these shortcomings. And after all, how hard could it be to manufacture a tropical underwater habitat in our apartment in the dead of winter in the Pacific Northwest?

The fish was on sale for $6.99; the pet store worker who sold it to us was a gentle spirit. A gecko rode his shoulder while he spoke.

He walked us through the basics of betta fish care, but they were out of customer copies of the brochure containing care instructions that was taped to the shelf where they sold them. So we snapped pictures of it on our phones, and I ran down Reddit forums and citizen-science websites that taught me the ways of the fish internet.

It’s an eccentric, seemingly male-dominated world in which people passionately expound on pH and ammonia levels in the water (there are test strips to assist with these), how often to change the tank (opinion varies widely) and how best to introduce fish to a new environment (there is no ultimate instruction manual).

It offered a glimpse of what it might be like to be the dude who throws himself into home brewing, hydroponics or culinary fermentations in his spare time, then eventually goes pro. Experience in those areas would probably help with keeping a fish alive at home.

An open plastic container at the bottom of a stainless-steel sink bears an orange label that reads “Male halfmoon.”
We took our 'male halfmoon' betta fish home in a small plastic container. But his origins beyond the pet store remain a mystery. Photo by Jackie Wong.

The early-pandemic sourdough-making craze was too ambitious for me, exhausted from chasing a toddler around. But in the fish tank and in the kitchen, there’s something weirdly galvanizing about the act of measuring out little doses of healthy live bacteria in service of a force greater than yourself. I feel like I’m starting to more fully understand the human urge to add more creatures: it’s a fatal flaw and a constant, if tragic, act of hope.

Lately I’m doing a lot of quick math, converting gallons to millilitres, wondering if the old beaker I’m using is imperial or metric and if my eyeball measurements are in any way correct. My son and I cleaned the tank when we got home on Monday after discovering Fishy Fish’s suspicious fins. Should we have been wearing gloves? Water under the bridge.

Today the tank is fresh, and Fishy Fish appears to be doing okay, at least for now. “Look at that cutie pie,” says my child, his face against the glass. I’ve read that betta fish start to recognize the people who care for them over time.

A young child with brown hair stands with both hands on the top of a chest of drawers, looking at a small blue fish tank containing a betta fish.
Photo by Jackie Wong.

There is delight in the uncertainty of this all, a lucky specialness that we have a creature to enjoy. In their book on friendship, Johal and Hern talk about it this way: “The unfamiliarity of interspecies relationships is the experience of exposure, of not knowing exactly how to behave or what to expect, not being able to defer to familiar reflexes.”

Maybe this is part of how we get free: to know we can’t and don’t know everything, and to let go of what we can’t perfect.

“Leaving easy relational confines, especially across species, requires a different kind of attentiveness, a gentleness, an observational presence, but also the constant possibility of loss,” Johal and Hern write.

“If being with a friend is always to grieve their coming loss, the becoming-grief of losing pets is telescoped because they die so young, or sometimes just leave capriciously. To love an animal is to be exposed to an often-way-too-soon loss, and often for reasons we cannot understand.”

Gentleness can live exactly here. In the tender aliveness of being there, and of the knowledge that this presence could quickly vanish. This is what distinguishes ownership from belonging. And there is so much potential in letting go of the ways we think we know best.  [Tyee]

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