Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!xanth!talos!kjones From: kjones@talos.uucp (Kyle Jones) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: sci or aquaria? Message-ID: <1989Nov21.165220.16634@talos.uucp> Date: 21 Nov 89 16:52:20 GMT References: <22222@gryphon.COM> <1989Nov14.194231.11595@NCoast.ORG> Reply-To: kjones@talos.uu.net Lines: 32 I voted YES for both the "sci" and the "aquaria" part of the name. As for the name "rec.pets.fish", there's really no comparison between alt.aquaria and rec.pets. Fish are not pets, any more than a milk cow is a pet. There's no friendly interaction between owner and the fish. You don't teach fish to do tricks, or scratch their ears, or get them to fetch the newspaper. A lot of people have the notion that if you want to keep fish all you need is a glass bowl, some gravel out of the driveway in the backyard, some tap water, and some fish. Some may notice that thing that blows bubbles into the water, but nonetheless, if aquarists kept fish the way people keep pets, in a short time they'd have a lot of dead fish. I doubt if the SPCA would be interested in boarding unwanted or neglected fish. As for aquaria being a hobby, someone here already mentioned the irony of "If you keep fish then it's a hobby, if you don't keep fish then it's a science." Should sci.astro be under the "rec" hierarchy just because some of its readers have telescopes, cameras, filters and so forth? The Q&A and discussions in alt.aquaria are at least as science oriented as the groups currently under the sci hierarchy, more so than some of them. I wonder how many people who've been flaming here have actually read both rec.pets and alt.aquaria for any length of time. How many of you are going on heresay? (No, I don't want a show of hands.) If you've read both groups, I do not see how you could fail to see the difference. These are my opinions. kyle jones ...!uunet!talos!kjones