"A Captive Fish is the Same as a Dead Fish." - A Review of The Dragon Behind the Glass

The Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World’s Most Coveted Fish by Emily Voigt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Like a lot of people, I can remember a time when I begged my parents to let me and my sister keep pets. Though my paternal grandmother owned an entire coterie of dogs (Poodle-Japanese Spitz crosses, for the most part), those were her dogs, and my sister and I wanted something we could call our own. So first came the rabbits, which we’d only had for a few days before they suffocated to death in the ash fall from the Mount Pinatubo eruption. Some years after that came a pair of lovebirds, which both died due to what I speculate were severe panic attacks after my extremely poor attempts to get them to perch on my finger by reaching into their cage and grabbing at them repeatedly. And then came a pair of fluffy yellow chicks, which actually managed to survive into young adulthood until a visiting grandaunt deemed them worthy to serve up at the dinner table as tinola (they were tasty, by the way).

By that point my parents were running out of ideas as to what they could give us as pets. At the time my sister was still in elementary school, while I was just about to start high school, and neither of them thought us ready to take on the responsibility of caring for something like a dog. In the end, they got us an aquarium full of goldfish, which turned out to be the wrong decision entirely thanks to the lack of enthusiasm my sister and I presented, and the amount of time needed to properly take care of the fish in the first place. While no pet is truly “low-maintenance”, a whole lot more work goes into properly taking care of pet fish - in particular, the fact that the tank needs to be cleaned out on a regular basis. After several months of cleaning out the tank every two weeks, my mother just gave up on the whole thing and gave everything - fish, tank, the whole shebang - away. We did not get another pet until many years later, by which time I was at university and my sister was just finishing high school: the pet dog we’d always wanted.

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