"Fish" Training Part 4

    Well, well, well. Fish has had an exciting week. He has a name. I'm a Harry Potter nerd (and I'm not ashamed of it!!) and so "Fish" is now Albus Dumbledore. I know, a bit cheesy, but I like it. And I can call him Dory for short and everyone will think I named him after Ellen Degeneres' character in Finding Nemo.

    So, that's taking care of.

    On to the training:

    Before 3/29 I was simply hooking the target onto the tank edge and waiting for him to touch it. And I think that was a great way to start him off. It was easy, and was more shaping than anything else (luring, etc). The reason I wanted to train a fish was to really work on shaping. With my dog and cat I tend to fall back on luring when they don't get it fast enough ("bad, trainer, bad!"). Yes, I shouldn't be comparing how fast they are learning against anything else, but they seem to have much more fun when I help them. And that's why I train. For fun. No competing or anything. But this blog is about a fish, isn't it?

    Anyway. He was doing quite well, and would touch the target when it was hooked to the wall. But he had developed this behavior of zooming towards the target and then turning around at the last minute, touching it with his side and zooming back away. In the beginning he was clicked for any touches or attention to the target. So, naturally he assumed that this was a correct response to the presence of the target. Hmm.

    Time to rethink my strategy. I picked up the target, and waited for him to swim away to the other side of the tank (OSotT). I dropped a floating pellet into the water and put the target's loop in front of it. Fish came zooming over, bumped the target and got his food. Amazing. I found that I could actually "catch" the pellet in a drop of water in the middle of the loop. This way, I could catch the pellet and move it around before allowing him to bump the target. Very very good! That is what I did on 3/29 and the next 1.5 days. On 3/31 we had a little problem. I don't know what scared him, but I went to give him his evening training session at 8:30 and he had very pronounced fear stripes. So I dropped in a bunch of bloodworms and that helped him a bit. I decided to skip the target training, but in thinking about it later, I probably should have gone ahead with it to keep his mind off of whatever was bugging him.

    I decided to turn his filter off when I saw the stripes. I knew that I was maybe going against his nature having the filter in there, but I decided it was worth a shot. The problem with not having a filter in a 10 gallon tank is that I would have to do water changes a lot more often. I will address this in a moment.

    On 4/1 I advanced the target behavior. I would hold the target in my left hand with my pink and ring fingers and hold a pellet or bloodworm in my thumb and forefinger. The mechanics of this is a bit tricky to explain. I would take a picture but that seems a little silly. So I held the loop just under the water, et VOILA, Dumbledore bumped the target, I dropped in the food. Nearly perfect. This good luck (?) continued all yesterday and today as well. This morning I held the loop a bit lower in the water and moved it in circles, figure eights, and did a big loop around the opening of the tank. Dory followed diligently and when I stopped moving the target, bumped it eagerly and took his food. 

     Back to the tank situation.  With the filter off, there is no current, so the food doesn't drift at all. This make training sooo much easier. I am thinking that I will buy him a smaller (5 gallon or so) tank that will be unfiltered and heated so that he can have his still water and I will be able to clean it more easily. The good thing is that I have good water going that I can transfer to the new tank along with gravel, etc.

But what to do with the big tank? Hmmm we shall see... 

-Lulu and Dumbledore (!!)