Brad Paisley Performed Surgery on His Son Jasper’s Fish

Brad Paisley and wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley share two sons, 14-year-old Huck and 11-year-old Jasper, the latter of whom had a pet who wasn’t doing so well last year. While at home with his family during quarantine, Paisley noticed that one of Jasper’s pufferfish wasn’t itself, so he performed surgery on the animal to try and help.

“My son had four pufferfish and was down to two — and this one was losing weight,” he told PEOPLE. Pufferfish sometimes can’t eat if their teeth grow too long, which seemed to be the case with Jasper’s fish. “Brad was looking up YouTube videos to find out what to do,” Williams-Paisley shared. After watching some tutorials, Paisley added drops of clove oil to a bucket of water to put the fish to sleep while he worked, cutting the tooth with a pair of clippers.

“You put him in the bucket, and he started to drift and go sideways, so I grabbed him in the net and held him,” he said. “They’ve got like a beak, and I clipped it and thought I killed him — but he made it!” Admittedly one of his more unusual moments, he explained, “These are the things in a pandemic you do yourself.”

The “No I in Beer” singer was more than a little nervous ahead of the procedure. “I’ve never seen him nervous before, but his hand was shaking,” Williams-Paisley recalled. Paisley added, “I have a friend who’s a brain surgeon, and I called him going, ‘Is it normal for your hand to do this?’”

Along with the pufferfish, the Paisley’s home outside of Nashville also hosts a number of different animals. “We have two dogs [Hoot and Annie], snakes, a bearded dragon,” Williams-Paisley shared. Her husband put in, “All of which belong to someone other than me, and who takes care of them?” “You,” she answered.

That caring nature is one of Williams-Paisley’s favorite things about her husband, as she named her husband’s “gigantic heart” as her favorite quality of his. “You care about all creatures, great and small,” she told him, recalling a recent evening of heavy rain in Nashville that prompted Paisley to run outside to check on a nest of goose eggs at 2 a.m. to see if they were okay. “They weren’t,” he said, as his wife added, “But it’s just so sweet how much you care.”