The R2 Fish School was recently covered in the Dallas Examiner! Here is a link to the clip:http://www.examiner.com/pet-scene-in-dallas/what-does-every-fish-wants-this-year-toys-that-offer-entertainment-the-tank
The R2 Fish School makes a truly unique Holiday gift and we have noticed a great increase in the number of people interested in the hobby of fish training! Fish training is simple, easy to do and the results are fast and effective.

You may have missed the Ellen show last week. Actress Hilary Swank was on the show and Ellen presented her with the R2 Fish School kit as a gift. Hilary has a Betta fish that is a prime candidate for learning all the tricks in the kit. They showed video of “Comet” performing tricks and chatted about fish training. Betta fish make excellent students and can be trained to perform the tricks in the kit. Looking forward to an update of Hilary’s progress! We will post video soon of the clip from the show!

Remember the famous line from the Disney movie Finding Nemo? The words “fish are friends, not food” seemed really funny at that time for most people watching the movie. Of course at that time not too many people knew about positive reinforcement techniques which could teach your pet fish all kinds of tricks.
Today, when most fish owners have started to get really excited about what they can do with their pet fish, those words from the movie have become quite important words to successfully train your fish.
One of the key requirements to successfully train your fish is having patience. You need to be patient and use the techniques properly to start allowing your fish to respond. If you see your fish as a friend, it will be easier for you to be patient.
Several fish owners who have already tried training their pet fish say your own attitude does play an important role on how fast your fish is going to get trained. Positive reinforcement techniques are powerful enough to train all pet fish, but how fast they can learn a trick would depend upon you as well. Needless to say, if you are really enthusiastic about it and genuinely see your fish as a friend, it gets that much easier.
Fish training requires a little patience, and is a great way to connect with your pet fish. Science shows us that fish are smart, that they can retain and remember many things. Fish intelligence is often underestimated. Above all fish training is a lot of fun and the rewards are amazing for both you and your pet fish.

The Limbo Trick

3. Where Are My Keys?
by Diane Rains

http://www.smartsmallfry.com/

http://www.freshwaterpearlspuppetry.com/bubbleblog/

Any fool can train a fish. No, wait, start again. (I’ve trained a whole bunch of fish, so what does that make me?)
Any reasonably patient person can train a fish. But to train a fish well —aye, there’s the rubadubdub! Certain key points and principles are essential to effective fish training. You might think of them as the keys to the city, if the city is Atlantis, or The Emerald City with very wet munchkins. (And BTW, you can have the keys to the city, but if you want the keys to the aquamobile, go ask your father.)
There are (at least) six keys to successful fish training:

1. Study
2. Be Patient
3. Be Still
4. Be A Lumper, Not A Splitter
5. Timing, Criteria, Rate
6. Think Fishy

Over the next few months, we will acquire these keys one by one and jam them onto a key ring that’s guaranteed to break every fingernail and send us into paroxyms of frustrated rage. No, wait. That’s my car keys. Our fish training keys are much friendlier.
Today we’ll start at the very beginning — a very good place to start — wondering when fish training will start making us some do re mi. Whoops! Me thinking out loud!
STUDY
You don’t have to know a lot to start training a fish. But the more you know, the more successful you will be. And if you want to train fish to do novel, complex behaviors, a deeper knowledge of operant conditioning (positive reinforcement training) is essential.
Where can you get the information you need? Two options: an animal training school, and/or the Internet. If you can do both, your head will be blissfully filled with more training trivia than you ever imagined in your wildest bouts of chocolate-induced euphoria. (Me thinking out loud again.)
Let’s start with the web (a very good place to start). You could google “animal training” and see what comes up, but you’d have to wade through a lot of nonsense. I’d rather have you dive right into the really good stuff. So, Lucky You, I’ll tell you where to go. (Just like I’m telling this fingernail-busting key ring where to go!)
• Karen Pryor’s Clicker Training (http://www.clickertraining.com/) – Clicker training is a training technique that uses operant conditioning to alter animal behavior by marking and rewarding correct steps toward a predetermined goal. Karen Pryor is one of the founders of this technology, and her site is a gold mine of information.

• An Animal Trainer’s Introduction To Operant and Classical Conditioning
(http://www.wagntrain.com/OC/index.htm) – A very thorough but easy to understand summary of behavioral principles.

• Ian Dunbar on TED
(http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ian_dunbar_on_dog_friendly_dog_training.html) – A top notch trainer explains the benefits of positive reinforcement and how to use it.

• Clicker Solutions
(http://www.clickersolutions.com/) – An extremely useful forum for discussions of animal training.

• Click-L
(http://groups.google.com/group/CLICK-L) – Another helpful forum for trainers.

• Shameless Self Promotion
(http://www.freshwaterpearlspuppetry.com/bubbleblog/ , http://www.jjmag.org) – My fish training blog, and my musical fish site.

• You Already Know About
(http://www.fish-school.com/)

If you want to get a real education in operant conditioning, get thee to Bailey Chicken Camp! Bob Bailey is probably the world’s authority on how to apply operant conditioning in animal training. At Chicken Camp you are immersed in training for 1-3 weeks, working with an animal even lowlier than the goldfish — the barnyard chicken. And almost everything you learn about chicken training applies to fish training, as well.
If you want to learn from Bob Bailey himself, you’ll have to go to Sweden: http://www.house-of-learning.se/chickencampengelsk.htm . Ya, it will be worth the trip!
But you can also attend chicken camps here in the US with Terry Ryan’s Legacy group: http://www.legacycanine.com/workshops/chicken-camps.html . Terry studied with Bob Bailey and follows his chicken camp model.
The lessons you learn from Chicken Camp will stick with you for a lifetime. (I went to Chicken Camp in 2005, and I’m still sticky.) You might even fall in love with chickens.
Now, if only they could swim…

Right On Target
by Diane Rains of Smart Small Fry, The Bubble Blog

Training fish is like home construction. (They both create bubbles which easily burst.) Before you can decorate the mansion of your dreams with a first class plasma TV home entertainment center and cute little trinkets from Shanghai, you need to build a sturdy foundation. If you first teach your fish to become fluent in basic behaviors, you’ll have a much better success rate with the fancy schmancy tricks.
I have noticed that fish, dogs, chickens, bluebirds, and possibly husbands tend to latch onto the very first skill that you teach them and then default to that behavior when they feel confused or uncertain during subsequent training. (This is why wives should train their husbands not to watch football, but to instead go shopping and buy an ipad for their beloved.) It is therefore important to choose wisely when installing your fish’s first trained behavior.
In my experience, the very best default behavior one can train a fish is targeting. By this I do not mean teaching your fish to shop compulsively at a Minnesota mega-retailer. After all, your husband is already there buying you an ipad. What I mean is, simply, teaching your fish to orient toward, touch, and follow a target.
Why is targeting a superb behavioral foundation? Because it allows you to direct your fish’s physical position in the aquarium. Because it grabs and holds your fish’s attention. Because it can facilitate the transfer of behavior from one object to another. Because it makes training two fish easier. Because I said so.
So what makes a good target? A target is a stimulus — an environmental condition that prompts behavior. There are oodles of stimuli present in an aquarium all the time: tank backdrop, water currents, sounds from within and outside the tank, yummy algae-laden gravel, bubbles rising to the surface, and on and on. These stimuli constantly vie for your fish’s attention, and you can’t control all of them. But you can out-compete them.
You must make your target salient (noticeable; standing out conspicuously; prominent). Make your fish say “WOW! Would ya look at THAT?!!” (Well, you can say this for him.) Fish have excellent color vision, and a bright red or hot pink object is a very salient stimulus for a fish. The R2 Fish School feeding wand (also known pertinently as the Target Feeder) is a fabulously salient stimulus. Its neon pink, extendable food chamber very easily attracts a fish’s attention. And once the fish discovers that food emanates from that fashionably pink chamber, she will fall in love and follow it anywhere! (Or in more scientific terms, she will become conditioned to associate pink with a pleasant outcome. But who needs scientific terms? Is the word “chocolate” a scientific term? I don’t think so.)
Once the fish has learned to approach, eat from, and follow the target feeding wand, expand your fish’s repertoire with other targets. My favorite fish target is simply a brightly colored piece of drinking straw stuck in an aquarium suction cup and adhered to the outside of the tank for convenience:

Initial training with this incredibly high tech device is simple: 1) fish approaches target. 2) Fish touches target with mouth. 3) Trainer “clicks” the instant the target is touched, in order to tell the fish exactly when he has performed the correct behavior. (The click can be a sound or a visual stimulus. My fish clicker of choice is a colored pen light; the click is thus a flash of light.) 4) After the click (as quickly as possible), the fish is given a food reward.
Some fish understand targeting from the very first session. Others take a little more practice. In general, it’s wise do at least 10 sessions of simple target training (with several reps per session) before moving on. You want this foundation behavior to meld with the fish’s brain like super glue.
So what else can targets allow you to teach a fish? Here are just a few examples:
1) Place: Teach a fish to go to his place (target) and thus stay out of the way of his tankmates. If you have two fish in a tank, make two targets, each a different color. Fish A (let’s call him “Watson”) for example, always works with the red target, and Fish B (let’s call him “Holmes” works only with the blue target. Then you can teach Watson to stay near his red target on the left side of the tank while Holmes learns a more complex behavior near his blue target on the right. (Holmes always likes a challenge. Also deerstalker hats.)
2) Push/Pull: Attract a fish to a ball, string or other object by either placing a target on it or making the object the same color as the fish’s target.
3) Manipulate: Complicated manipulation of objects begins with a simple touch of a target affixed to the object. This works with tank ornaments, food, windchimes, handbells, and baby grand pianos, to name just a few. I used strategically placed targets to teach my very first fish, Ricky, to “play” a toy piano. I first trained him to touch a red straw target as described above. Then I simply affixed pieces of red straw onto the piano keyboard. His urge to touch every target resulted in a beautiful glissando up and down the keyboard. Then I just faded the targets. That is, over several training sessions, I made the targets smaller and smaller, then finally removed them entirely. Here’s the process and the result.
Your fish should practice basic targeting every week, even when she has progressed to more spectacular tricks. Repetition will help your fish will retain her understanding of and attraction to targets, as well as improve her (and your) timing. If your fish learns to target early, precisely, and with enthusiasm, a thousand training opportunities will follow.
Bullseye!

NEXT TIME: Keys to the City

I guess when you say you have taught your pet to do the slalom, play fetch, score a goal, shoot hoops etc the assumption is you must be referring to your pet poodle or border collie. Well i think pet fish agility training may just be more impressive. Not only is it impressive, its also much easier than most people realize. I recently trained my pet dog to weave between my legs as I walked, I rewarded my dog with a treat as she performed each correct movement. This exact technique of operant conditioning can also be used to train a fish to perform a similar trick (the slalom), the fish is rewarded – by using the feeding wand device with each correct incremental movement. A fish tank is a very controlled environment, it is an excellent way to learn the basics of positive reinforcement training and teaches us all the building blocks of learning (reward based learning).
There are also similarities in what your pet fish or dog will get out of learning agility behaviors – they are both enrichment for the pet and wonderful experiences for the pet owner.
Russ
R2 Fish School

Hi Fish Trainers,
We are launching a Holiday video contest! Submit your new video of your trained fish and we will send you a R2 Fish School T Shirt or a New Extended Target Feeder for free!!
Email us at customercare@r2fishschool.com for info on sending us video files. We will post your video to youtube.com and your fish will become famous!.
Our goal is to show the world the amazing variety of fish that have been trained using the R2 Fish School kit!
Can your fish do the limbo, play fetch or swim the tunnel? We would love to see the video and share it with the world!
Thanks – Happy Fish Training!
Russ
R2 Fish School

When Russ of R2 Fish School invited me to write a recurring column for the company’s blog, I readily agreed. This is because 1) I love fish training. 2) I love talking about what I love. 3) I too have a blog, The Bubble Blog. My blog and R2’s blog scratch each others’ backs. Ohhh, that feels good. 3) Russ’s request happened to catch me just as I was finishing the last bite of a sumptious piece of flourless chocolate cake. In the throes of Chocolate Delirium, I’ll agree to anything. So you, Dear Feeder (of fish), will reap the rewards of my willpowerlessness (along with my invention of new words). Speaking of words, remember that word, “rewards.” You’ll be reading it early and often.

“But who is this person,” you ask, “and why should we care what she thinks?” My name isn’t a household word, or even two words. I’m surely no Cesar Milan. (Stop calling me Shirley. Call him Shirley, and then stop calling him. He’s not worth it.) Instead, let’s dial up a summary of my credentials.

I am genetically programmed for animal training. My great-uncle, Volney Phifer , was a world-renowned circus performer, intercontinental adventurer, and trainer/promoter of animals for the silver screen and Broadway. He trained and adored the original Leo the MGM Lion. I inherited Uncle Volney’s fascination with animal behavior, though not his machismo. (He trained lions, I train lionhead goldfish.)

I hold a couple of degrees in Wildlife Science with an animal behavior specialty, along with an uncompleted PhD (ABD) in veterinary physiology. (That is: PhD? — Aw, Bite Dis!) And I have been training goldfish to do remarkable things for four years. (Four years is a long time to do a remarkable thing. Really, they could rest now.) I have trained puppet show actors, quadruple hoop swimmers, pole weavers, soccer stars, spin dancers, waiters, bell ringers, glockenspiel tappers, piano players, and The World’s Most Famous
Musical Fish.

And so can you. This column is about you, and what you and the fish you love can
accomplish as a team. Carpe See’em. (Did you see ‘em do THAT??!!!)

Diane Rains
Smart Small Fry

http://freshwaterpearlspuppetry.com/smartsmallfry/

NEXT TIME: Right On Target

Happy Holiday shopping season ahead! We are excited for the Holiday shopping season and our ongoing project of sharing the wonders of fish training with the world! The R2 Fish School is in our (humble) opinion one of the most unique holidays gifts available. There is definitely a novelty appeal to the kit – it is the perfect gift for anyone who owns a fish and is ready to take the next step and learn more about what their possibly bored fish is capable of learning and achieving. We often receive the question – is the kit for the fish or the trainer? The answer is both, the kit is enrichment for the fish and a unique educational tool that teaches the basics of positive reinforcement training. Our kit is a popular educational item, unique novelty gift and award winning pet product.
Happy Holidays and Happy Fish Training!
Russ

http://www.r2fishschool.com

The mythbusters guys did an episode recently to learn more about the 3 second myth of goldfish memory. Here is a link to the show (the goldfish clip starts at around 3.50)

The show proved that goldfish can be trained to swim through a maze, they used color cues and food reward as the positive reinforcement training technique to completely bust the 3 second goldfish memory myth. The target feeder wand in the fish school kit is both a color cue and a food reward device to teach fish tricks (many a lot more impressive than the maze shown on the show!)