Culling is when you humanely euthanize a living creature. You actually care about the animal's well-being if it's going to suffer or not. Killing is when you literally end the creature's life with vain and purpose. There's a difference.
Most of the time (particularly for fish) culling means killing. But for some, culling can also mean just removing that animal from the gene pool by either selling it as a pet only, or having it spayed/neutered.
Of course you can't spay/neuter a fish. However, some breeders will sell 'culls' on as pets rather than kill them.
Most of the time (particularly for fish) culling means killing. But for some, culling can also mean just removing that animal from the gene pool by either selling it as a pet only, or having it spayed/neutered.
Of course you can't spay/neuter a fish. However, some breeders will sell 'culls' on as pets rather than kill them.
This is true, but some breeders also give the culls away for free. :)
Personally, since my wilds breed true and don't really have a standard as such, I would only cull for actual physical deformities.
This is things like bent spines, missing ventrals (I personally hate the look of bettas with no ventrals), extremely bad scaling etc.
Also if certain fry seem to be falling behind or not thriving compared to their siblings, and I don't see an improvement after a period of time I will cull.
I don't really seem to get a lot of deformities though. Never had a missing ventral, and the only fry that had a crooked spine has recovered and now I can't even point it out in the grow-out tank. I think most of my weaker fry tend to cull themselves as I am a pretty harsh fry raiser.
I cull fish with messy scales, extreme rt, turning vt-ish, deformed bodies, runts and anything else I find thats undesirable. Im too fussy with them lol
In New Zealand,
We'd cull fish with messy scales (as these are hard to breed out), deformities, etc etc, unless we were sure for certain that the owner would not be using the fish for breeding purposes.
Some also cull fry if they have too much, or if they are sick, slow etc.
'Culling' essentially is the process of getting rid of an animal that have bad deformities, genes etc that aren't desired, or the fish is extremely sick.
'Killing' implies that it is done in cold blood.
Generally when a breeder 'culls' a fish, it's because they are looking for best interests in their Betta lines, not because they hate them etc.
I know a lot of breeders here in NZ cull fish, especially because of messy scales as it's hard to breed out and wouldn't be too good if it got into New Zealands already limited Betta population.
My male that I have was part of a cull. I got him for free (I only paid shipping), with the agreement that I would not ever breed him. So not all breeders cull by euthanizing the fish, some do give them away to good homes.
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