• 

  These colourful molly fishes that were imported from Thailand each have a single-digit number tattooed onto their bodies, ranging from 0 to 9.

Enlarge

SINGAPORE: Recently, Singapore has begun importing fish from Thailand, and not just any regular fishes either. These molly fish from Thailand each have a single-digit number (ranging from 0 to 9) tattooed on their white bodies.

The reason? These fish are meant for punters who want winning numbers for the 4D lottery!

Qian Hu Corporation Limited Manager Ye Jinquan (name transliterated) pointed out that many customers liked to buy sets of 4 fish which were tattooed with the customers’ own lucky numbers. Others simply bought 4 fish at a go, hoping that the numbers on the fish would give them a winning combination and some pre-Chinese New Year riches.

22-year-old Qian Hu Liu Shenglin (name transliterated), said during an interview that the 4D fish had arrived in Singapore about 2 weeks ago and they had presently sold around 40 of them.

Of the customers who had bought the 4D fish, some had bought 4 while others had purchased eight. Customers had bought fish with numbers from the whole range of 0 to 9 without any noticeable preference for particular numbers.

He said that there wasn’t anyone who was in the business of tattooing fish in Singapore, so Qian Hu approached people in Thailand to get the job done. “Before [they are] tattooed, the fish are sedated so they will not feel any pain.”

He said the process for tattooing fish was not much different from tattooing a human being. Needles are used to insert pigments into the skin.

Easy To Look After

Each 4D fish costs S$3.00 (around RM6.90). A regular molly fish only costs S$2.00 (around RM4.60).The tattoos can last for three to four months.

Since the “number fish” did so well last year (about 300 of them were sold during the New Year period), Qian Hu decided to import 600 in one go, hoping to make a large profit with them.

“It’s not hard to take care of a molly fish, so long as you put in a bit of sea salt when using a new aquarium.” Liu said that sea salt also had to be added every time the water was changed. It was best if this could be done once a week. Molly fish are also simple eaters that do not require exotic foodstuffs, so they are extremely easy to look after.

It is believed that many of the customers who bought 4D fish did so in the hopes that the fish would be able to bring them luck and had no actual interest in rearing fish.

The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) expressed concern over whether such people would be able to properly care for the fish.

Mosi (name transliterated), an executive of the SPCA, said that the fish traders already showed a lack of concern for animals when they produced such fish by tattooing numbers on the bodies of the fish. They meddled with the natural development of the fish just for the sake of a marketing gimmick.

She believes that tattooing a fish just to humour some people’s superstitious beliefs is an irresponsible promotional method. “Even if the pigment used for making the tattoos is harmless, the tattoos were an unnecessary procedure.”