Pet Mastry +1 - Fish

So I've seen quite a lot of things with pet fish lately, mostly with goldfish. I kind of passed the image on the left off as a possible Photoshop image, but I did feel that I wish I had a little floating plastic ball like that for Firion to play with or something. Good chance he wouldn't be interested, but it'd be something to do other than to make bubble nests all the time.

Then my little brother posted this link on my Facebook, telling me to teach Firion to do tricks like this. For those of you not familiar with Nico Nico Douga videos, to turn off the scrolling comments, click on the icon on the bottom right corner. This isn't on the direct site, so there's also no need to log in to view this video. Anyway, the video shows this person's pet goldfish that can do this pretty interesting trick. When the person drops a ring into the fish tank, the goldfish will swim down to it, stick its head in so that it's sort of wearing the ring around itself, and bring it back up to the surface to the person's finger. Definitely an interesting trick to witness. Of course, Firion is so much sleeker than the goldfish in the video, so I kind of doubt that I could find a ring of the right size for him to attempt that trick. But even more importantly, how do I train a fish to do tricks like that? Well, I happened to stumble across the solution.

While browsing through YouTube videos, I came across this, and I was like... "Holy crap, I found the missin' feesh!"

A training kit for fish; the R2 Fish School. It comes with a lot of goodies like the soccer goal, rings, and most importantly, the feeder wand. The wand is the most crucial part, and can be bought separately for $13.00. I've taken psychology class to know how to train pets and such to learn tricks, but immediate positive reinforcement for fish is harder because of how hard it is to get their food to them as soon as they complete a task, due to their food either floating or sinking, depending on the kind. But the wand is an effective solution for that, and definitely works as many people seem to have effectively trained their fish with this kit.

The complete kit costs $29.99, and I would be interested in getting it if I had a large tank to use them in. Firion's fishbowl is... well, already full of decorations that a lot of things would simply not fit. However, I did succeed in trying something simple lately. Kind of like the hand-feeding trick shown in the video, but I would have a food pellet stuck on my fingertip with moisture, and bring it close to the surface of the water for Firion to jump out and eat it. He's done it three times now, so it might be something neat I can do with him whenever I'm feeding him. My goal is to get him to not be scared of fingers, and if I do that enough with him, maybe he won't swim away when I put my hand in the water. We'll see how that goes though.

Speaking of big tanks though, I was offered a big fish tank, but we couldn't take it since we had no place to put it at the moment. It would have been great if I could get one... I could get a different brand of lights for the fish tank that might go on sale occasionally, unlike the one I've been looking at for small bowls. >_<

But yeah. Now that I know that there's the option of being able to train your pet fish now, it certainly gets me inspired to do a little more with feesh in the future. When the time comes, I'll be buying the kit, probably.