Every person calling someone else a 'moron' for throwing a bunch of fish in a new tank should lighten up and ask themselves whether they themselves might have been a 'moron' once or twice in some context other than fishkeeping, and have people on some internet board somewhere sneering at their ineptitude. I bet some of you are crappy drivers, feed your kids junk, shrink the laundry and declaw your cats. Puppy mills are in business because people can't stop themselves from buying dogs at strip-mall pet stores.
They're FISH. Not ponies. You probably eat 'em sometimes after they've been stuck in gill nets for a while and then left to flop around on the deck of a boat or just chucked live onto ice. It's a sport to reel them in with metal hooks stuck in their mouths. Feeder fish and shrimp get munched by the 'real' fish.
"Fishless cycling" is something that only comes up on the internet because pet stores won't make money selling ammonia and telling people who just bought a new setup that the right thing to do is sit there for weeks staring at an empty tank. In my area the employees are usually high-school kids taught to put fish in bags for minimum wage, not aquarium buffs like you and me who aren't working in the LFS because then we couldn't afford all our d*mn aquariums.
If I see someone going astray in the LFS I might strike up a conversation and suggest something, but I'm not going to do a lecture on the nitrogen cycle because for the most part they don't give a crap. If they gave a crap they would have looked it up on the internet already. A good ploy if people seem undecided about fish is to shove them towards the platy section; they're colourful, have babies, kids like them and they're hard to kill. If they're interested in more than that you can usually tell.
As long as stores sell kissing gouramis people will buy them for 5 and 10 gallon tanks. And a little tiny pleco! It's a sad fact of life that fish are considered disposable pets by many, entertaining, fairly cheap, and prone to mysterious death. Some people will persist. Some will lose interest. Some people like to research a hobby when they take it up. Some don't. If it's your hobby you tend to take it seriously and be hyper-conscious of people who don't. You really have to keep things in perspective.
Every aquarium fish you buy supports the trade, and for every fish who lives in spendor in your tank, hundreds of fish will die by culling, transport, disease, wild-caught "collateral damage" or LFS boo-boos before those 'morons' even have a chance to give them death by ammonia. You like fish? Stop keeping fish, and become an activist to ban the whole aquarium trade, and you'll save more fish than you ever will putting them in your tanks and 'educating' people in pet stores. Nobody should kid themselves about that.
End of rant. Have at me if you want.
