City in Ohio Cancels ‘Goldfish Swim’ Tradition Using Live Fish!

Update (August 23, 2024): For many years, the city of Springdale, Ohio’s Parks and Recreation Department hosted an event wherein goldfish were poured into a community swimming pool and children tried to catch them. Its city council just made the wonderful decision to use only plastic toy goldfish instead, moving forward! Thank you to Springdale officials for this compassionate decision and to everyone who spoke out for these animals.

Original post:

Despite a public outcry, the parks and recreation department of the city of Springdale, Ohio, has apparently held exceedingly cruel “Goldfish Swim” events on the last weekend of the swim season for decades. Such bullying activities don’t appear to be advertised now, and since organizers won’t provide us with any assurance that they’ve stopped, we’re left to assume that they may be planning to hold a “Goldfish Swim” this year.

During these chaotic events, approximately 1,000 goldfish are typically dumped into a community swimming pool, where children 12 and under splash around frantically while scrambling to catch the terrified animals with their bare hands in the hope of taking them home. Obviously, being dumped into a pool teeming with overexcited children grabbing at every fleck of color in the water would be a horrific ordeal for most animals—especially these tiny beings, who view nearly everyone and everything as a predator. Exposure to even trace amounts of chlorine can cause them to experience respiratory distress. Furthermore, because fish can transmit bacteria such as E. coli, such events pose a risk to children, too.