Bricomarché pulls live fish lamp after viral complaint
The French home and garden stores Bricomarché and Truffaut have stopped selling an aquarium lamp that contained a real live fish after a social media complaint went viral.
The ‘Tetra Betta Projector’ lamp, manufactured by Tetra, has been pulled from shelves and discontinued online after a customer visited a store in Loire-Atlantique and complained on Facebook about its sale of the live tropical fish inside the product.
The lamp, usually sold for between €20 and €30, projects coloured light through a glass aquarium and holds a live, colourful tropical fish - of the kind usually seen in South East Asia - in just 1,8 litres of water.
The fish cannot escape the water and is not much smaller than the space itself. For comparison, fish of this size would usually need a minimum of 20 litres of water in which to swim and live, not 1,8 litres.
The marketing for the lamp said it offered a “zen” environment during the day, and an attractive “real spectacle” at night.
The companies have now confirmed that the lamp is no longer on sale, although at the time of writing it is still available via some online stores, such as Amazon (despite receiving many negative reviews).
Writing on Facebook, Bricomarché customer Sawah Bens first drew attention to the lamp, explaining how disgusted she was at discovering that the fish used in the design were real, and were being kept in water bowls “the size of a yoghurt pot”.
“How can we allow this kind of thing?” she asked, in her post, shown below. “How can Bricomarché dare to sell a brand like this, and how is it possible that a brand like Tetra was able to invent this?”
Her post has been shared over 13 000 times, gathered over 10 000 reactions, and received hundreds of comments.
Bens has since updated her post to thank Bricomarché for pulling the lamp from its shelves, and asked Tetra if it would “break its silence” to comment on the issue.
In a response to the post, a reply from the “Bricomarché team” read: “We have read with attention your comments...the protection of animals is close to our hearts, and we would like to inform you that we have taken the Tetra Betta Projector product out of sale from all the Bricomarché stores in question.”
