Training goldfish? A Tall Fish Tale?

Pet lovers have trained  pets for centuries. We have dancing dogs, dancing horses and now sport-playing and dancing goldfish! Amazing as this sounds, a company called R2 Solutions is quickly gaining fame wih their new goldfish training kit.

The training? Soccer, basketball, doing the limbo, slalom swimming and go-fetch. Yes really. The company owner Dean Pomelleau explained on Good Morning America that his kids wanted to get a dog as a family pet, but he felt this type of pet would be too high maintenance and suggested getting goldfish.

The loud and negative response to his suggestion for pet fish was “boring… boring, BORING!”.

Unfazed, Dean got some goldfish for his family and then got creative. Using a feeding wand as his training tool and miniature underwater gym gear such as basketball nets, goal nets and limbo rails, Dean was able to get their goldfish to score soccer goals, fetch rings and score basketball hoop goals! Imagine these pet pix… WOW!

As a fish owner, this sounded rather fishy to me and like a lot of work to just prove a point to kids. But hey, maybe it will catch on.  Dean, now being tagged as the “Fish Whisperer” seems to get a lot of enjoyment from this goldfish-training activity and as mentioned, has built a business around it, with a very cute website.

Giving how we pet lovers tend to imbue our pets with human-like qualities, I can only wonder what Fred, my main fish (yes, the seagull is Fred too… makes it easier to remember ;-) would think about a little fish gym being installed in our super deluxe fish tank. My next thought? Cleaning the fish tank with all that gym equipment.  Hmmmm…

When checking this out on the web, I came across some rather disturbing videos on YouTube (and other social networking sites) about goldfish training. In these cases the goldfish are shown to do synchronise swimming in a flat-bottomed pan. Ingenious one would think at first sight. In checking the comments it would seem that all is not well. The people who produced these videos apparently make the fish swim in synch by magnets. They get the goldfish to swallow small magnets (no! no! and NO!) and then use a magnetic wand under the shallow pans to move the fish around in synch.

Training fish with food treats is one thing (over feeding issues?) but magnet manipulation quite another in terms of humane treatment of pets. I’d like to be convinced that the food treats are not an issue since the whole goldfish training kit from R2 Solutions looks kind of fun… even for the fish.

Petlovers! Check out Dean’s goldfish training site and tell us what you think about it. 

Reminder: This is “Be Kind To Animals” week. ;-)