Yesterday I went to the LFS and bought some live crickets to feed to my catfish. I haven't done this before. The only live food I have feed my catfish has been live earthworms.
I manage to get some in the tank and he ate some, but I feel really bad, cause I think crickets are really cute when you look at them close up.

Also I dont like the fact that they are drowning They ones he took awhile to get to I just fished out and put back in the container.

I think I will only put a couple in at the time so he can get to them quick, to minimise the suffering. I dont think I will buy anymore as I just fel to guilty about it.

Just wondering if anyone here feeds any of their tropicals live insects?

I sometimes fed my goldfish meal worms but then I stopped after a black moor seemed to get irritated gills and kept rubbing against the pebbles. I've heard that sometimes the little feet and jaws can get caught in the fish's mouth or throat.

One person's pet food is another person's pet so it's always a touchy subject.

I used to feed meal worms to my catfish too, but I found that he wasn't able to digest them properly.

The only live food I have feed to me GF were blood worms and earthworms.

The only "live" food I have fed to my goldfish is earthworms. My shubunkin Fuzzy was the only one that would eat them, sometimes 3 or 4 medium worms per feeding. But since he is gone, I probably wont be feeding those anymore.

Hey there, I don't keep trops anymore, but I used to feed crix to the archerfish when I was working in a lfs, the crix wouldn't have time to drown they were snapped up so fast there was no time for suffering. It's similar to when I feed my frogs, the crix don't even know what hit them, although, some of them drown, they're pretty stupid, they crawl under the water in my vivarium and then stay underthere until they die




LOL, Annette, that's so true, Dave is always going on about where does the line between pet and food sit.. he's always trying to make me feel bad about feeding my frogs live food, -the crix are bred for food, and who wants a bunch of noisy, stinky old bugs anyways? Hmmn, I dunno, I used to keep mice as pets and now I feed them to my snake, culled ones tho', I wouldn't put live food in with my snake. But I often wonder if I'm being cruel to my snake denying him of his natural behaviour of stalking and catching prey.

A friend of mine kept a little hopper mouse in with her small goanna. The goanna would eventually eat the mouse but in the meantime it seemed to find the mouse annoying, it kept climbing all over the goanna who would try to get out of it's way. So as for a snake missing all the action of the kill? ... who really knows but it shouldn't miss what it doesn't know. Do we humans miss the thrill of the kill? Most of us don't give it a second thought but there are some dedicated hunters out there.

As for "stinky old bugs", I happen to like crickets a lot and wouldn't mind keeping them as pets except there are heaps of them around here anyway.