Doug Baldwin just wants the fish to like him.



They are koi, and they live in his backyard: Alexander and Eliza are the largest, plus four smaller ones named after the Golden Girls. After long days, Baldwin and his wife, Tara, unwind next to their fish, surrounded by suburbia and a far-off view of the Seattle skyline: their own little escape. One day Baldwin read about the fish and learned something he has thought about ever since. Some people train their koi to swim to the surface by ringing a bell every time they feed them, the aquatic twist on Pavlov’s experiment.



Baldwin hates this.



“I’m realizing now, as strange as this sounds, I have to spend more time with the fish when I don’t feed them,” he says, laughing. “I just want them to be comfortable around me.”



He knows how this sounds, like a Tony Soprano-level sociopath. “I might be,” he says, laughing again. But the point he’s making is...