Fish are one of the only pets that people seem to be ok to eat. If goldfish actually tasted good I wouldn’t be surprised if we ate those at well. So why do we get sad when they die? Clearly other fish are not sad when their fellow fish die. I remember buying several guppies one year, and one of the guppies happened to be pregnant. Slowly I realized that there seemed to be less and less guppies. The strange thing was that I couldn’t find their dead bodies, until I realized that there was one guppy eating all the dead ones. It turned out that that one lived for over a year. I think the reason why we get sad especially at young ages is because we are not used to death. To children death is a strange topic, and even to adults.
Fish die easily, very easily. I remember one night me and my sister won several gold fish at a fair. We were so excited and decided to name every single one of them. We got the bowl, the fish food, and little rocks. About a month later, I woke up to the horror of every single gold fish floating at the top of the bowl as dead as a, well, dead thing. I was horrified by this, however, my sister who had had her fair share of dead goldfish brushed it off and was barely phased by the fact that our goldfish had died overnight.
In short, pet fish help children learn about death. They learn how real it actually is and how easy it can happen. Also it teaches kids that they have to be able to move past the death of a loved one, or at least the death of their goldfish.