When we were little kids my brother emptied a bottle of wood glue in the fish tank, they all died.
The following stories are pretty graphic...
Later on we had some mice in a fish tank (no water, they didn't dehydrate
) and there was a wire mesh lid (and my cat would often lie on this and stare down at the mice). One day I was cleaning out the cage and ripped the wire mesh but thought nothing of it. The next day we woke up to find a decapitated mouse's body in the tank and its head stuck in the tear in the mesh. It had jumped up and tried to struggle through but the wire cut its head off.
The other mouse went crazy, started eating itself, and ran around in circles for hours nonstop. We eventualy just let it go.
Years later we bought some more mice and one day we came downstairs to find one of the mice eating the other one, there was blood splattered all inside the tank and bones everywhere, and the white mouse had blood all over its face, it was lke something from the Silence of the Lambs. So we let that one go too.
And then years after that we bought a little black and white kitten, called Cat. she was cute as a button. When it came to get her de-sexed there were some complications with the surgery and she became very ill, with some sort of infection. Over the next two or three months she stopped eating, she became just skin and bones and her fur and teeth started falling out, she could hardly move and if she did eat she would just vomit it all up a few minutes later. The vets didn't know what was wrong, and the only thing they could think of was some sort of surgery but it was very, very expensive and it wasn't guaranteed to do anything, so we just couldn't afford it She was in and out of the vet's and they loved her so much that the staff got together and offered to do the surgery for free, but it wasn't a success, and she was put down shortly afterwards. That was only four or five years ago and I miss that little Cat so much. Before that I'd never really understood how people could love their pets so much.