2395 Impacted Fish

It's nice when you read heartwarming stories about people and their pets.  Even when their pets are cold-blooded.  Me, I'm a mammal man.  I figure if you're going to totally support another living creature they ought to at least be on the same limb of the family tree.

Not so a United Kingdom man who sought to save his goldfish.  He paid a veterinarian $465 for life-saving surgery for it.  Because it was constipated. 

Putting aside for a moment how much attention he needed to be paying to his goldfish to even notice, constipation is no joke.  It's a big killer of horses, who sometimes slurp up sand when they're eating hay off the ground and end up with fatal blockages.  They call it being impacted.  The impact is severe indeed. 

Likewise, on the other end of the animal scale, the face mites I wrote about recently, who die when they fill with feces because they have no anus.  You'd think an anus would be one of those things nature would automatically include in an evolved genetic package but who knows.  Nature's always experimenting with different ways to limit lifespan or we'd have one very overpopulated world, so dying when you fill up with waste might be a good approach.

Think of all the politicians and pundits we'd not have to put up with because they're so full of you know what. 

Anyhow, the UK dude got his goldfish back unimpacted and feeling the freedom you can only feel right after a colonoscopy.  The vet said, "The actual operation is straightforward, administering the anesthetic is quite complicated." 

Harder, presumably, than giving a fish a colonic.  

Thank goodness the guy didn't have some other aquatic pet, like a sea anemone.  Imagine giving an enema to an anemone. 

America, ya gotta love it.