Credit: Dr Stephen Beatty |
They had a good life, but what do you do with dear Gerry the gerbil or Robbie the rabbit when they slip away into the next hutch? How about not flushing them down the loo? Especially when they’re not even dead.
It’s a problem in Australia, where mutant goldfish are surviving sewage treatment to flourish in brackish waterways in the south-west of the country. Without natural predators, the fish have grown to dinner-plate proportions, causing algae blooms and a stirring up of sediment, not to mention eating the eggs of native species. |
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“That is a pretty abhorrent way of disposing with an animal,” says Gudrun Ravetz, a vet and president of the British Veterinary Association. “We’d hope that it isn’t happening in Britain.” Alas, it may be; in 2009, a goldfish was rescued from a sewage plant in South Lanarkshire, in Scotland. They called it Pooh. |
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