Why Bringing Home a Tiny Wild Bass is a Terrible Idea

There was a bright orange Home Depot bucket leaking murky, foul-smelling swamp water onto my kitchen tile, and my four-year-old, Beau, was standing over it like he’d just discovered gold. I had a baby on my hip, a load of laundry waiting on the couch, and absolutely zero patience for whatever was swimming around in that bucket. My husband strolled in behind him, looking entirely too proud of himself, and announced that Beau had managed to scoop up a tiny, squirming infant largemouth bass down at the neighborhood stock tank. Beau, bless his heart, immediately asked if we could put it in a glass bowl next to his bed like a goldfish.

I’m just gonna be real with you—my grandma always told me not to bring outside trouble inside the house, and I can confidently say that wild pond fish fall squarely into the category of outside trouble. We’ve all been there, standing in the kitchen trying to figure out how to gently crush a toddler's dreams without causing a full-blown meltdown, but keeping a wild fish as a pet is a line I absolutely draw in the sand.

That innocent looking minnow is actually a monster

When you look at a tiny largemouth bass, it just looks like a cute little minnow you’d buy for two dollars at the pet store, but these things are literally apex predators that are hardwired to eat everything in sight. I guess I kind of thought fish only grew to the size of their tank, but apparently, that's a total myth, and these guys just keep growing based on whatever they can shove into their mouths, or maybe it's the water temperature, I don't really know, but they get massive in like three months. You think you're getting a cute little desk pet, and suddenly you're housing a prehistoric river monster.

Then there's the housing situation, which is a complete financial nightmare. To keep one of these things alive through adulthood, you can't just use a starter aquarium; you need a tank that holds something crazy like 150 or 200 gallons, which basically takes up the space of a small sofa and costs about as much as a used car. I checked the prices online just to prove my husband wrong, and by the time you buy the tank, the heavy-duty filtration system you need because they produce so much waste, and the special water testing kits, you're easily out a thousand bucks just to house a fish you got for free out of a mud puddle.

And don't even get me started on what these things actually eat, because they'll absolutely turn their noses up at those little colorful fish flakes. You have to feed them live food, which means I'd be personally responsible for purchasing and storing things like bloodworms, brine shrimp, and eventually live feeder fish that this bass will violently swallow whole in front of my traumatized children. If you make the mistake of putting it in a tank with any other fish, it'll literally cannibalize its roommates the second it gets hungry enough, and I'm not running a gladiatorial arena in my living room.

Not to mention, the game warden will probably slap you with a hefty fine for taking undersized game fish out of a public waterway, and I don't have the budget or the time for a misdemeanor over a two-inch fish.

What Dr. Evans had to say about pond water

While my husband was trying to convince me we could just put it in the bathtub for the night, the baby wiggled out of my arms, crawled over to the puddle on the floor, and immediately tried to slap his hands in the muddy water. That was the end of the discussion.

I brought this whole scenario up to our doctor, Dr. Evans, at a checkup a few weeks later, and she looked at me like I had lost my mind. From what I understand of her explanation, wild aquatic animals are basically swimming Petri dishes covered in weird bacteria. She mentioned something called fish tank granuloma, which sounds like some kind of medieval skin rotting disease, and regular old Salmonella, which I thought you only got from raw chicken, but apparently, it thrives in fish poop.

She told me that her interpretation of the official guidelines is that kids under five shouldn't even be touching aquarium water, let alone wild lake water that's been sitting in a plastic bucket on a hot Texas afternoon. Toddlers are gross, and they constantly have their hands in their mouths, so keeping a tank full of wild bacteria at toddler eye-level is just begging for a week of gastrointestinal misery that I definitely don't have the energy to clean up.

So, instead of arguing, just march that heavy bucket right back down to the creek while distracting your screaming kid with a popsicle and explaining that wild animals prefer their own muddy families over a glass box in our kitchen.

Better ways to entertain them

Look, I get it, we want our kids to love nature and be off their iPads, but there are better ways to do it that don't involve bringing the swamp into your house. If you're looking for sustainable, actually safe ways to keep them busy, check out the Kianao toy collection.

When we finally dumped that fish back in the pond and came inside, I needed a safe place to put the baby while I scrubbed lake mud out of Beau's jeans. The absolute best thing I bought this year is the Wooden Rainbow Baby Gym from Kianao. I'm going to be honest, I bought it mostly because it's pretty and made of real wood instead of that neon plastic that makes my living room look like a daycare center exploded. But it's genuinely been a lifesaver. The baby will lay under there for a solid twenty minutes batting at the little hanging elephant and the wooden rings. It gives him that sensory stimulation and hand-eye coordination practice, and it gives me enough time to bleach my kitchen floor. It's sturdy, the colors are muted and calm, and it doesn't play any electronic songs that make me want to pull my hair out.

For the older kids who are obsessed with water play, we compromised with the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. Now, I'll tell you right now, because they're made of this soft, grippy rubber material, if you leave them on the living room rug they'll attract dog hair like a magnet. But they float perfectly in the bathtub. So when Beau is whining about wanting a water pet, I throw him in the tub with these blocks, and he builds little floating towers. They're non-toxic and BPA-free, which makes me feel better when the baby inevitably tries to chew on them.

Speaking of chewing, if we *do* have to go down to the lake so my husband can fish, I refuse to let the baby touch the water, so I keep him strapped in the stroller with the Panda Teether. At around $15, it's totally budget-friendly, and it's made of food-grade silicone so it's safe for his gums. The best part is that when he drops it in the dirt—which he does, constantly—I just wipe it off with a baby wipe, and when we get home, I toss it straight into the top rack of the dishwasher. It survives the heat perfectly and comes out sanitized.

We're raising our kids to respect nature, but part of respecting nature is leaving it outside where it belongs. Let the wild things stay wild, and keep your kitchen tile clean. If you want to grab some gear that will really survive your kids without introducing swamp bacteria to your home, check out the links above.

The messy questions y'all always ask me

What if my kid already put the pond fish in our home aquarium?

Oh honey, you need to get it out. Like, today. If you've other fish in there, that wild little bass is going to look at them like an all-you-can-eat buffet the second it gets a little bigger. Plus, pond fish carry weird parasites that domestic pet store fish have zero immunity to. Scoop it into a Tupperware, take the kids for a "release party" at the lake, and then do a massive water change on your tank before your goldfish catch something nasty.

Will a tiny bass eat our goldfish?

Yeah, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt. Largemouths are aggressive predators. Even if the bass looks smaller than the goldfish right now, it'll harass it, nip at its fins, and eventually outgrow it and swallow it. They have giant mouths for a reason. Don't traumatize your kids by making them wake up to a half-eaten pet.

Can't I just release it when it gets too big for the bowl?

So thing is about that—if you put a wild fish into a domestic tank, it gets exposed to whatever bacteria or pet-store diseases might be lingering in your water or your filter. If you dump it back into the wild lake months later, you could accidentally introduce a weird foreign disease into the natural ecosystem and wipe out a bunch of native fish. Once you bring it into an artificial environment for a long time, putting it back isn't as simple or safe as it sounds. Just don't bring it home to begin with.

How do I clean my kid's hands after they touch pond water?

If you're out at the lake and don't have a sink, use baby wipes to get the visible mud off, and then use a healthy dose of hand sanitizer. But the second you walk through your front door, march them straight to the bathroom and use warm water and antibacterial soap. Don't let them eat snacks in the car on the way home if their hands still smell like swamp water. I learned that lesson the hard way, and it's not worth the stomach bug.

Is it okay to keep a minnow if we know it won't grow big?

Even if you know for an absolute fact it's a minnow and not a baby sport fish, you still run into the same bacteria and parasite issues. Wild water is dirty water. Plus, wild minnows are used to cold, oxygen-rich flowing water, and they usually just die in a stagnant indoor glass bowl within a few days anyway, which just leads to tears and a stinky house.