Posted on 01/07/2003 10:25:38 AM PST by jigsaw
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German family has kept a live eel in its bathtub for the last 33 years and even trained it to swim into a bucket when someone needs to wash.
"He's part of our family," said Hannelore Richter of Bochum in western Germany, whose husband Paul caught the eel on a fishing trip in 1969 and took it home for supper.
His children fell in love with the eel, refusing to let him kill and cook it, and since then it has lived in the bath, shared it with the children when they were small -- and has even moved house with the family, German newspapers reported.
"It's a weird situation," zoologist Walter Gettmann told Reuters. "He has certainly lost the skills needed to survive in the wild. But if he is fed properly, he can survive in a tub."
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