I have many reasons for why I did this.
Some of them are as follows.
1) aesthetic beauty. How many would cull a fish with imperfect finnage? How many would avoid buying one because of this kind of damage? How many would avoid showing a picture of one that they had because they would get criticized by many for it? How many board posts have been heated over the topics of how a fish appeared? Aesthetic beauty Drives this hobby.
How many times have we seen ""sell the best...cull the rest"?
2) Knowledge... The knowledge of how Discus finnage regenerates has the potential to help many people that do want Discus specimens with really nice fins that may have been badly damaged by multiple causes. Pursuit of Knowledge about this fish is one of the reasons I got involved with this board.
3)I'm a scientist.. understanding the hows and whys of things is what drives me, and in turn allows me to help others.
4) Technical evaluation... The fish in question was not one of the most severely affected fish.... Its actually a control for other fish that have far more extensive damage.
5) to attempt to undue the damage a careless owner did to a member of a species of fish that I admire more so than any other.
Though I realize that superficially the trimming of the fins may be stressful to the fish, and could be construed as cruel. I think it was probably far more stressful an act to catch these fish in the wild, transport them for days in buckets to airports, then to intermediates, then to wholesalers, and sellers. Finally to an owners tank, where they ,may be mistreated. The procedure used here took literally 1-2 minutes and the fish acted as if nothing had happened moments after returned to the tank.
This will hopefully allow a beautiful fish to become what it would have been had it not been treated poorly at the hands of people in the first place.