Kids These Days

So my daughter is having a friend over after school to kill fish.

In reality, I don't know where the problem originates--she says the experiment was the teacher's idea, but she and her friend hopped right on it. Her rationale is that we're going to buy fish (guess what she means by "we're going to buy"?) that would have been fed to larger fish, so they were going to die anyway.

So as I type this, my daughter and her friend are sitting at my kitchen table experimenting with what happens when you add salt to a fish's water. Or sugar. Or use tap water versus bottled water. And I'm surprised by it. You see, my daughter loves fish to an unreasonable degree. When she was a toddler, all she could talk about was getting a fish. We HAD a dog and a cat, but no...she wanted a "shish". And that never really changed. Her last fish died about a year and a half ago, and she's cried bitterly when every one died. She talks about getting more fish often, too.

All of which led me to...well...not expect her to cheerfully sit at my kitchen table and watch a bunch of fish die while she took notes. And I don't know how to feel about it. I certainly don't want her heartbroken over the fish, and I suppose it's better that she can conduct her assigned experiments without requiring counseling and all that. I really do. But I was pretty sure she was a person who would be bothered by watching fish die, and I'm not sure I wanted to be set straight on that.