Dominick’s Fish

He kept hundreds of fish, of all kinds. He bred them and crossbred them, experimented with habitats and water types, watched them mate and fight and eat each other. They were more than a distraction; they were a kind of miniaturization of his own expanding, multifaceted business enterprises. Dominick liked to create networks, chains of interrelatedness in commerce, in social circles, and in his increasingly exotic collection of fish. The “fish room,” as he nicknamed the den of tanks he kept in the basement of one of his buildings, was a haven, a place to watch his own busy life replicated in a controlled ecosystem.

“At his peak, Dominick had forty-eight tanks on the go,” Debbie remembers. “Fascination drove everything for Dominick, but the hobby grew so large for reasons he couldn’t control — they kept breeding and breeding. But he was happy to be a part of that life cycle. It wasn’t an obsession, but he went through obsessive stages.”

After Dominick died, the last thing on Debbie’s mind was his other family, the one with fins. Not that she didn’t care, but the fish were always Dom’s responsibility, his thing. Plus she had a memorial to organize, all the legal nonsense to plow through, and was sorely in need of sleep and downtime to process her loss.

So the day the East Coast Aquarium Society called from Halifax and offered to perform a “fish rescue” on Dominick’s menagerie (Debbie had never heard of the group and wasn’t aware that Dominick was known to its members), she “panicked, completely panicked. I thought, ‘Holy shit!’ I said, ‘Listen, honey, I’ll call you right back!’ I put the phone down and ran across the street to the fish room and fed the poor things. They were frantic, practically jumping out of the water. I’d forgotten about them for more than a week! I shudder to think what state those things would be in if ecas hadn’t come along.”

The rescue of Dominick’s fish took several weeks to organize and a paramilitary team of fish enthusiasts to perform. Vans were loaded with insulated coolers (to keep the fishes’ water temperature as close to the habitat temperature as possible during transport) and special fish-carrying plastic bags, the thick kind used by pet stores. Fish were divided into sets depending on species, size, and compatibility. Maps to pre-assigned homes where the fish would be “foster tanked” were handed out to the drivers, and the tanks were disassembled and cleaned. Within days, Dominick’s generations of fish were spread across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

ecas president Lisa Borden remembers the morning she arrived at Debbie’s door. “It was mid-March, it was freezing outside, and trying to keep the fish at a reasonable temperature was really difficult. Transferring them from these massive containers to smaller containers and then bringing the temperature back up to normal was the biggest challenge. I got home at 6 a.m. the next day, after I was sure all of the fish would be okay.” She continues: “Dominick had so many fish, and so many different kinds, we had to match up the keeper with the fish to make sure they knew how to keep them alive. There were more than a hundred fish. I wasn’t fully prepared for how much work it would be, because Dominick’s fish were our first rescue.”

A few months later, ecas held an auction of the fish and aquarium equipment. Many of the foster keepers bought the fish they had already been caring for. Dominick’s vast collection of gear was parcelled out to various buyers, and part of the money went back to the organization to cover the cost of the rescue. Dominick’s stacks of fish-raising guides, manuals, and arcane fish hobbyist periodicals (always strewn about his house like old newspapers) form the core of ecas’s new lending library.

“Dominick would be so proud,” Debbie says. “He loved the science of fish keeping. I once watched him perform artificial respiration on a fish. It had flopped out of the tank and he held the stupid bugger in the water and swooshed it back and forth until the water was forced into its gills, bringing it back to life. Who else would do that? ”

In telling people about ecas’s extraordinary rescue, I’ve learned a lot about the way people think about fish as pets. There are two reactions: complete admiration for the organization’s dedication (the minority response) or stunned disbelief that invariably ends with the ugly question, why didn’t Debbie just flush them?

Apparently, even in a society obsessed with pets and pet care — to the point where there are now dog and cat spas — most people don’t consider fish sentient beings worthy of concern, and certainly not creatures deserving of an expensive, exhaustive volunteer rescue effort.