Gone Zooing

So, last week I trained a fish – Stevie. Yep, that’s right. I trained a fish. Perhaps I should start at the beginning. When I first started thinking about training the program animals here I researched various animal training workshops. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) offers one every February at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Last year it was full. This year I made sure I was one of the first one’s to turn in my application. So for the past year I’ve been eagerly awaiting this workshop that would help me tweak and hone my meager training skills. Finally the week had come.

Day one we meet our instructors – some of the best known animals trainers in the world. It was a little intimidating I must admit but they were all wonderfully down to earth and inspiring. The excitement happened at the end of the day when we found out what animal we would be training for the week. We had all been anxiously wondering about this all day. There were three different species that were being trained: rats, alligators (baby), and fish. I got the fish.

At first I was not excited. I think I was a little overwhelmed by the question, “How in the world do you train a fish?” Quite honestly I was afraid I would not be able to do it. We got our natural history sheets and went back to the hotel assigned with the task of coming up with a training/shaping plan for the behavior we would attempt to train our animals. After reading about our fish (a couple of different species of cichlids) I came up with my behavior: at the very least I would target Stevie (our animals were all named after our first crushes, by the way) to a laser, my dream ultimate behavior was to cue him through a hoop. The first day’s lecture had prepared us to come up with realistic plans based on the animal’s life in the wild. I was cautiously optimistic.

To make a week-long story a little shorter, Stevie was fantastic. He went right to the laser and was consistently targeting to the laser and following the laser on the first day. We added the mesh tunnel and he went right into it. Stevie actually seemed to enjoy the tunnel. Every morning when I came in he had moved the tunnel to a different place. I did have trouble figuring out how to make Stevie understand going through the tunnel on cue because he kept wanting to go through the mesh to get to the target instead of through the tunnel to get to the target. My wonderful training mentor, Michelle, helped me work through any problem I encountered. I made the mistakes I always make when training and she helped me see how easily these could be avoided. In the case of little Stevie, tunnel re-arranger and mesh-pusher that he was, we came up with the plan of pushing the tunnel against the front of the tank and weighting it with rocks. This way he couldn’t move it around during a training session and it took away the option of going to the front of the tank and trying to follow the laser through the mesh. It worked! Little Stevie started going through the tunnel to get to the laser and food that were waiting for him in the middle. I started moving the laser and food back little by little. We were almost there! Stevie would soon go through the tunnel just by my shining the laser at the far end. Then, Stevie stopped eating. And got a little green around the gills. And this happened right before our final presentations. The staff took Stevie and put him back in the aquarium he had come from so he could recover from whatever was ailing him. Little Stevie was written out of the fish group’s final presentation.

You would think that the ending of the week would have put a damper on the whole fish training thing. But it so didn’t. I had trained a fish. I knew it. I didn’t need to show it off. And in the process I had learned so much from all the wonderful instructors and the other participants in the class. My original goal for taking the class was to get more technical training knowledge but I came back with so much more, including more confidence in my training skills and a training process I could use for every animal I work with. I’ve even been practicing with my cats at home – the same cats that for years have been training me instead of the other way around. Stay tuned for more training footage and updates. I’m sure there will be lots of these now that I’ve trained little Stevie.