Well to be honest I'm not sure myself if hybrid fish are in fact, against my principles, for the reason that I myself am considered a hybrid by many people I've had the misfortune of encountering in my life, including my own paternal grandmother who insists I have no right to exist and said ...and these are exactly her words--that I have a responsibility to NOT bring more children like myself into the world. I'm 40 years old and for those of you too young to remember the era before political correctness, let me say my grandmother was by no means in the minority in her expressed opinions. Such attacks were a regular feature of my life back then.
Now how can a human being be a hybrid? Well some people do consider the races to be so different that it is an abomination of nature to mix them and consider mixed-race people to be hybrids or if they are less polite "mutts". I'm decended from at least two races as far as I can trace up to the previous 3 generations.
Having been told more than once by a good number of people in my early years that I should never have been created nor have the right to exist and that I'm a freaky looking thing...I guess I kind of feel for the BP Cichlid. I can't be upset strictly because it is a hybrid.
However, I do feel that the mindset that has created the BP is an abusive one. The well-being of the fish are definitely being sacrificed in order to produce fish that can readily be manipulated via dyes and mutilation and passed off as new and exciting species--at least for a time (witness the "unicorn BP--which from what I can tell is a BP that has had part of its dorsal area cut out, or the heart parrot, which has had its tail docked).
So, hybridizing fish certainly is a different issue than people of diverse races having children. I don't mean to cloud or confuse the two mainly unrelated issues. I just mean to state the origins for some of my sympathies for the BP and how my own feelings are less concrete than hybridization in and of itself being against my principles. Where it occurs in nature or in animal husbandry to produce a healthy hardy result, to, for example, survive a disease that preys specifically on its parent species...then I think it's a fine thing. But to produce a living thing just to make it more amenable to cruel "cosmetic" manipulation and to actively deceive the public...yes, that is against my principles. On those grounds, I probably should not have gotten my fish. But when you're standing there in front of those cute google eyes and your own goofy looking cat had recently died and your whole family is in mourning and missing that touch of the weird and eccentric that pet provided...and your kid is all excited to see her cartoon come to life...brains turn to mush and principles fly out the window, at least sometimes.
