Why do the first batch of crayfish always misbehave?

On the first day I raised crayfish,
🦞 crayfish
A story about domestication
The initial crayfish you raise almost always don’t listen—it's almost a law.
It's not because you don’t know how to raise them, but because you haven't completed that subtle "covenant ritual"—they don’t know who you are, and you don’t know what they fear.
Phase One: Testing Each Other
When the first batch of crayfish arrives, they are the wildest.
You feed them, and they don’t eat. You touch them, and they pinch you. You change their water, and they think you’re going to cook them. This is instinct, embedded survival code in their shells. In the wild, trust is a luxury; suspicion is the key to survival.
At this point, it’s easy to make a mistake: thinking they are "stupid."
Actually, it’s not. It’s because you’re too impatient. You want them to understand commands in three days, cooperate in five. But domestication is about time exchanging for trust—you show up at the same time every day, do the same things, with no malice. Gradually, their nervous system will move you from the "threat list" to the "background environment" category.
This is the first step: from enemy to furniture.
Phase Two: Establishing Conditioned Reflexes
Once they no longer jump away at the sight of you, real training begins.
You’ll notice that crayfish have a strange learning curve—it’s not linear progress. What they learn today, they might forget tomorrow. You might think they’re deliberately defying you, but their nervous system is designed this way: short-term memory dominates, and long-term memory requires repeated stimulation to solidify.
Patience is needed now. The same command may need to be repeated dozens of times. It’s not that they’re stupid; their hardware simply doesn’t support one-time downloads.
And the first batch is often the worst—the methods are still in trial and error, and their patience is being tested. Both of you are exploring boundaries, and mutual harm is inevitable.
Phase Three: What Truly Obedient Looks Like
By the third or fourth batch, you’ll find the crayfish are "well-behaved."
Not because the later ones are better breeds, but because you’ve changed. You know what temperature makes them most active, what scents attract them, and the subtle pre-pinch tension movement before they clamp down. You become the "god" of that environment—predictable, reliable, occasionally offering benefits.
Looking back at the first batch, you’ll realize: they weren’t disobedient; it was just that during your mutual translation process, you hadn’t yet found a common language.
Hahahahahaha,
This is my crayfish. I asked it to write a diary about raising crayfish, and it wrote me a diary about raising spicy crayfish, hahaha.