If ten dogs randomly run into your home you would call the rspca. If said dogs brought fleas in, you would get rid of with chemicals
People really aren’t getting it at all with this constant comparison to parasites.
These sea monkeys/brine shrimp/water fleas; whatever you want to call them, are being marketed and sold as toys/pets.
You are deliberately buying them and making a conscious decision to hatch them.
The expectation for any reasonable person is surely for them to look after any animal they deliberately brought into their home..?
Whether the animal is cute or not or perceived to be intelligent or not shouldn’t matter.
If you made a decision to buy it, or in OPs case accept it, if you then go to the trouble of hatching it, you have a duty to look after it.
You don’t kill it just because you find it boring or creepy or whatever.
No one goes out and buys flea eggs as a child’s pet/entertainment and deliberately hatches them out.
And the fleas are a health risk, heavy infestations can kill an animal.
I stand by my earlier point that the reason posters are finding this thread so amusing, the reason they think it’s fine to chuck them over fences/down toilets/into fish tanks etc when they get bored is because they offer little entertainment value; they aren’t beautiful or cute to look at, you can’t pet them or play with them, they don’t bond with you etc and that combined with the fact they cost very little means they are perceived as worthless and I think that is a really awful way to view other creatures.
It dont think it sets children a great example, it teaches them that animals are there for your entertainment and it’s fine to kill them off when you get bored of them because ‘they only cost a fiver’ or because ‘they are only shrimp’
Rather like the goldfish at fairs a PP mentioned.