Abracadabra or torture?

Judging by Web postings, some viewers of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala quickly tried to replicate Fu Yandong's magic act with fish. But their "magic" involved what some critics call torture.

A horse (top) goes crazy while filming the TV drama Romance of the Three Kingdoms in 2009. Another horse's legs were injured during the shooting. [Photo/provided to China Daily]

One anonymous netizen admitted as much.

In a detailed post on Tianya.cn, a popular online community, he said he first tried to make goldfish swallow metal beads, "but they spat them out immediately". Then he tried to super-glue metal plates to the fish's belly, but that proved too slippery.

Finally, he crammed magnets into the fish's mouths and sealed them with super glue. "After the glue dried up, the magnets wouldn't fall out," he wrote. He was going to film his "success" and post it online, but abandoned that idea. The two fish in his experiment died.