I am sitting here, thinking on the subject of training. I am practically obsessed with posititve reinforcement, and training. I have a dog, 7 birds,a bearded dragon,4 arachnids and now a koi. I actually bought a goldfish some ghost shrimp(to keep things clean)and a platinum ogan Koi.Forgot to feed him one night when I was late for work, and my phiance Jeremy picked me up and said "Silver went on a killing spree last night"
Seems "Silver(the Koi) decided he had a taste for shrimp dinners. With a lil goldfish belly on the side. That spurred me to research koi and I went on one of my learning sprees. Hence now I know the colour variety name of silver. Now even though my biggest reason for buying a fish was to train it, this started a need to know about takeing care of and appreciateing yet another speicies of critter in my pack.I now know that a koi can grow up to 3 feet, and 200 pounds. I think a bigger tank, or mayby a dolphin pool will be needed someday.But think about the shiny platinum 200 pound fish doing a jump on cue! If I could get a treat to him that is. Havent quite figured that one out, since he dosent like feeding at the surface.
I have to admit, I have a bad habit. I will sit reading about training my animals for hours, instead of doing the critter chores(Changing paper, walking dog)let alone do I actually get any training done. I am a very bad procrastinator.How do I train myself to get a Round-tuit? Yet even now i sit here and think"Can Jeremys new fiddler crabs be trained? They did take some food from my hand!" Aww better start training myself first. But where to start?
One thing that helps me is being on a set schedual. I have an alarm on my phone that goes off at 9:00pm. "Oh! It's time to train the chinchilla!" Another thing that might help is right when you get set up for training reward yourself with a bar of chocolate or something.... LOL Karen Pryor's book, "Don't Shoot the Dog" talks all about that! If you haven't read it yet, I really do reccomend it!
Here are some videos I found on youtube a while back on training fish, maybe it will give you some ideas on how to train your own fish!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STLgWyXGUMg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68WnyieMRUg&playnext=1&list=PLC3031A7FBB5A9903&index=2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4kPZ25IMn0