I’m So Sad

This is sort of an emergency but I haven't figured out how to start a new post yet - only reply to existing posts. Deanasue - I'm sure you'll know how to euthanize a fish - Dwarf Gourami - she is SO much worse today - sleeping on her side under the heater. Made her favorite food which she rejected, she just looks bruised all over (beside the swim bladder disease): I think its 1:9 ratio of clove oil with vodka or other alcohol - because clove oil won't dissolve in water and needs to be dissolved in the vodka first before mixing with tank water. What the total amount I need to mix up for her - a cup, a bowl, a gallon? I want to make sure it's good and warm since she just wants to hang by the heater.

I don't want to do this

She's lasted months with it but was a active happy fish that just didn't eat or poop for two months, then started eating small amts (hated peas) and then her behavior seemed so good last week - but this has got to end - it's horrible to watch.

I simply add 6 or 8 drops of clove oil in about a 1/2 cup of warm water into a small container (like a deli container) with a lid. Shake well. I put the fish w/tank water in a slightly larger container, then slowly add the clove oil/water mix. It's over pretty quickly. (Never used vodka or any alcohol).

I know it’s hard and I’m so sorry. I use a very small glass bottle, like an old medicine bottle. I fill it almost to top with tank water and then add about 4 drops of clove oil to it. Shake it very well. Place the fish in a small butter dish size container with a little tank water. Slowly add the clove oil solution a drop or 2 at a time. If you add too much at a time they can freak out. Do it slow. The fish will swim fast for a few seconds and then drift off. I then add the rest of the mixture. Leave the fish in the mixture for 30 minutes and be sure there is no gill movement. I then bury mine. You can add some vodka at this time too in order to I assure death. I didn’t use it on Tai the other day. He didn’t need it. You will feel some relief once it’s over. It’s so hard to watch them suffer.

I had read somewhere that the clove oil can hurt the gills so I think I will premix it with vodka in the 1:9 ratio suggested, so I'll need a little larger container. Thanks so much for responding so quickly. She was looking like she was recovering last week but this is no recovery - it's too painful to watch. I chopped heads off of rats in graduate school, I had to be tough about it but even if we did 20 a day it broke my heart. I was also terrified of getting my fingers chopped off with along with their heads. I've seen enough death for 10 life times and this little fish is going to break my heart tonight. Thanks again for your advice and handholding.

Jan Cavalieri said:

I had read somewhere that the clove oil can hurt the gills so I think I will premix it with vodka in the 1:9 ratio suggested, so I'll need a little larger container. Thanks so much for responding so quickly. She was looking like she was recovering last week but this is no recovery - it's too painful to watch. I chopped heads off of rats in graduate school, I had to be tough about it but even if we did 20 a day it broke my heart. I was also terrified of getting my fingers chopped off with along with their heads. I've seen enough death for 10 life times and this little fish is going to break my heart tonight. Thanks again for your advice and handholding.

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Thoughts are with you.

Chopping heads off rats in graduate school? Was it serial killer school? (maybe I've been watching too much Criminal Minds tv.)

AbbeysDad said:

Chopping heads off rats in graduate school? Was it serial killer school? (maybe I've been watching too much Criminal Minds tv.)

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Do you enjoy real grossness? Their little eyes would still blink at you and move around right after it was killed. Also the other rats could SMELL their death coming so by the time you killed more and more rats they got wilder and wilder. That's really what got to me - it's that waiting, smelling what is about to happen to you that is the real cruelty.

Then there were the roaches. Our lab was in the basement that was in a building built on a street that flooded a lot. In fact the name of the street was "Flood". So lots of bugs. My professor got a license to handle commercial grade pesticides and this was 30 years ago when they really weren't safe. The idiot (a scientist) decided to use a coffee cup to "measure" - of course the poison went through the Styrofoam like it wasn't even there - sending most of us to the on campus hospital to all get treatment for severe respiratory distress (besides smoking of course, this kind of behavior was always going on in there. We'd work 12 days using ether for surgeries - a known carcinogen and many other chemicals but we were a PSYCHOLOGY dept not a real SCIENCE department so we didn't have clean hoods to work with and all the other supplies we needed.

Back to roaches - once we got the solution mixed up (still no masks) we started pulling furniture away from the wall. One was a 4 shelf bookcase - when we pulled it out - in was SWARMING in the exact shape of a 4 shelf book case. Then we were moving 50 lb packs of feed and one of the guys picked it up and the bag tore and it full of roaches - they had displaced all the food in the bag. They were in our hair, down our shirts, falling from light fixtures and we're all yelling and screaming - we found a number of albino roaches - i guess the mutation rate somebody said was 1 albino per 3 MILLION roaches.

See they couldn't let employees work in these circumstances, but as a student my stipend was $610 a month for working 60 hour weeks for over 4 yrs. Another guy had been there 6 years, and he had come from another school already with his master's degree. He already had started turning gray. It was slave labor.

Euthanized "Greta" by first mixing a 9:1 ratio of vodka to clove oil. I guessed at how many drops it takes to make a ml then guessed again at how much water was in the bowl (I also heated the water just a little more then I brought her and put her in it. As soon as the clove oil hit her she went wild - her behavior was far from settling down so I basically dumped in the whole bowl of drugs in with her tank water and she went immediately still - by the the clove oil had clearly separated out from the vodka and water - just another unfortunate death I got to watch. I'll use a whisk the next time and make an emulsion because as soon as they hit the water the oil and vodka separated - so I'll emulsify the contents before I put the fish in. Learned I know less about fish anatomy than I thought - found all the upper structures, but nothing in the middle of tail end of the fish. Everything had changed color to a dirty grey from the solution and I couldn't find intestines, ovaries or stomach. No evidence at food anywhere even though she appealed to eat some worms earlier.

All this talk about cutting off heads of rats, autopsying fish, and cockroach infestations.. I thnk I feel ill. I think I’m gonna ....

Just showing off how tough I am. Actually, the fact that I didn't go into that field shows I'm not tough at all. Big softy even for research rats. (the big 3 yr old males loved to have their tummies tickled). It was a 4 yr nightmare and all it got me was a job in a cubicle (actually later I had a real office) doing "anything with numbers" because all the MBA's in the office apparently couldn't do basic mathematics.

My daughter works for the State now (IT field) and she just got a raise that was $10,000 more a year then I got after working there for 30 years (oh I also did quite a bit of IT stuff - project management, application design). About a month before I left on disability they gave me one of the biggest raises in the office - which just raised my pension amount significantly. So they did me some favors and I loved the people. Don't every make fun of "lazy civil service workers" because most I worked with went above and beyond what was expected of them and for less pay than the private sector but generally more stable benefit packages but we were doing layoffs and outsourcing like crazy too. Heck, I was lazy during slow times and worked my butt off during other times - it's that way with most non-manufacturing jobs. I'm sure there are just as many goof offs in the private sector. And just as many "disgruntled, life's not fair" workers as well.

Hey look - no gross stuff in this post - must be my bedtime! Bless all our pet fish that have died living in an unnatural environment - we can only do our best to educate new fish owners about best practices as well as to expand our own education.

When I was in biology class, the teacher euthanized a rat and was just cutting into the rat when just as blood spurted out, I fainted and fell backwards. Seeing that I was standing with my face about one foot from the rat, the teacher thought maybe I got a whiff of whatever she was using to euthanize the rat.

You'd think by now with all my years I'd know when to just keep quiet, smile, and walk away... BUT NO! My apologies to the sensitive viewers.

Jan Cavalieri said:

Euthanized "Greta" by first mixing a 9:1 ratio of vodka to clove oil. I guessed at how many drops it takes to make a ml then guessed again at how much water was in the bowl (I also heated the water just a little more then I brought her and put her in it. As soon as the clove oil hit her she went wild - her behavior was far from settling down so I basically dumped in the whole bowl of drugs in with her tank water and she went immediately still - by the the clove oil had clearly separated out from the vodka and water - just another unfortunate death I got to watch. I'll use a whisk the next time and make an emulsion because as soon as they hit the water the oil and vodka separated - so I'll emulsify the contents before I put the fish in. Learned I know less about fish anatomy than I thought - found all the upper structures, but nothing in the middle of tail end of the fish. Everything had changed color to a dirty grey from the solution and I couldn't find intestines, ovaries or stomach. No evidence at food anywhere even though she appealed to eat some worms earlier.

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Oh gosh, I wish you had taken my advice on how to do it as I learned the hard way on what NOT to do. It was a vet that told me slowly add a drop at a time and let them drift off. I had one try to jump out f the solution once before I learned the correct way.

Reading all of this and thinking...boy, you guys should have worked in an E.R. I have stories that you wouldn’t even believe. I won’t tell you where we found roaches in a woman once.