Original YT playout date: 28 August 2010
Duration: 3:30
This is a showcase of what Czech customs seized from holidaymakers returning from travels in exotic places with parts of engangered species breaching the CITES convention.
In order not to cause species to be depleted on this planet it is essential to stop the demand in these things. At least until they can be farmed in a sustainable way. Even certificates given by the person selling it may turn out to be bogus, and the cruelty involved in getting some of these products needs to be considered by souvenir hunters before they buy something gruesome which will hasten the demise of natural ecosystems.”
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Views at the time added to HTV: 367
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Comments at time added: 4
Music used: None
Languages used: English
Animals/plants featured: None
I don’t believe in euthanasia, for animals just as for humans. I do believe in dying with dignity which means not surrounded by other fish pecking his eyes out before he is even dead. So I would give the fish normal conditions in which it would be comfortable if healthy, low light, and solitude. Once it is really dead you can feed the body to other fish, flush it down the toilet, whatever. But the life, while it is there, is sacred, and should have dignity, even for a fish.
Whatever science could say about its neurones and synapses, he was your pet.
Boiling water for twenty minutes is a pretty good way of getting rid of all the dissolved gases. Sure, the chlorine will go, so will the oxygen, the CO2 for the plants, the nitrogen, you name it.
Waste of time, money and energy
No need to boil the water, just shake it a bit and leave it to stand.
And you’ll have used quite a bit of electricity boiling the water, which you now need to re-oxygenise by pouring the water into a 5 litre plastic bottle three quarters full and giving it a good shake. Doing that a few times would have gone a long way to kicking the chlorine out anyway without losing the gases in the atmosphere from the water, and saved your electricity bill.
A more excellent way
If you are doing water changes nice and regularly and therefore in any given day are only changing something like 10% of the water, then the level of chlorine won’t upset most aquarium fishes too much. I never bother with it myself and the fish always look happy enough after a change. Warsaw Poland has a bit of chlorine but maybe there are places where there is a lot more chlorination going on, I don’t know. But if the water is safe to drink from the tap then a ten percent change is unlikely to upset most fish so maybe you are just making a rod for your own back…”
If “we” are vegans, it is because catfish are not vegetables.
If “we” are Jews, it is because Siluroides do not have scales, but either naked skin or bony plates. Therefore they are not kosher. Not kosher is not kosher, don’t ask me to justify it biologically. If you want to be frum, eat kosher, that’s all.
If “we” are anyone else, then the question turns on what do we mean by “catfish”.
The huge biodiversity of catfishes
There are over 3000 species of catfish in the world and they demonstrate vast diversity. From the candirù of South America which swims up people’s urethra if they urinate in the water, all the way up to giant Pangasias or Siluris species among the largest freshwater fishes of the world. Plus various marine species also.
“My name is Vandellia / They call me Candiru / It won’t be you be eating me / It’s me be eating you.”
Just to be clear about how astonishing that fact is, it means that 1 in 20 of the vertebrate species in the world is a species of catfish, in Siluriformes. There’s no other order of vertebrates like that. And the cladists have been trying to break it down until they were looking like clado-masochists, and the geneticists have been getting frenetic and still the Siluriformes is reckoned to be all the product of a single putative common ancestor.
Some species of catfish deliver toxins, some electric shocks, some like Corydoras or Otocinclus are too tiny to be of use as food, but are very popular in aquaria. Some species makes sounds, some get out of the water and walk about, some are transparent and you can see right through them.
There is one catfish fossil despite all of this, its name is Corydoras revelatus and the author has held it in the palm of his hand in the non-public area of the British Museum of Natural History thanks to the kindness of the late Dr Gordon Howes, ichthyologist.
Catfishes which are regularly eaten
The catfishes most commonly farmed as food are European catfish, Silurus glanis. As long as you have got one from sustainable sources they make good eating. I recommend “som fri”” in Russia or the Ukraine. Clearly they are a sports fish too, and in these cases we put them back, we don’t take them and eat them.
In the US it is channel cats, the Ictalurus and Ameiurus species which the song “Walking in Memphis”” references in the words “they got catfish on the table””. These are also fine eating as long as they are fished from sustainable and legitimate sources.
In the Amazon region they eat large Loricariids like Plecos. If you should be there as a tourist and are not a Vegan or kosher Jew, you might want to try one.
A lot of tropical rivers though are home to parasites that can transfer to people. And here I come onto the kind of catfish which has become more popular in supermarkets in recent years, namely Panga.
These can be farmed in particularly polluted parts of the Mekong river. I suggest you don’t make these a part of your menu, although trying them once might be ok.
Original YT playout date: 26 June 2010
Duration: 12:29
The scariest thing I’ve done this year was get in the chair lift in Prague Zoo. It doesn’t stop for anyone. I wasn’t sitting very square in it and the drop was quite a long way to the wire net below.
When they saw me get on it, the lift operators started calling on the name of the second person of the Trinity and His earthly mother, which didn’t bode well. Anyway, I filmed the whole thing. I supposed the ski lift could drag me away despite their fears that it might not hold, but the wild horses to be found at the top of it couldn’t drag me out of Prague Zoo before closing time, even though the battery was only good for the six small films you have here. I could certainly do another six at least with what’s left to show, but I’ll save that for another time. Continue reading “They couldn’t drag me away… (PV #36)”→
