Mar 21 2009
Choosing A Training Collar
An object marketed as a “training collar”
This post was inspired by a question on a completely different dog forum, but it’s a good question. “What kind of collar should I be using for basic obedience training?” It’s relevant for scentwork training for several reasons. First, to get your dog to use his nose for you, the dog will have to have a high degree of initiative and confidence, because he’s going to have to figure out what you want (you can’t shove him into position and expect him to figure it out), and because someday he’s going to be right when you think he can’t possibly be. Second, if you want to do Schutzhund, or if you just plain want your dog to be willing to protect you, you don’t want to have trained him to cease a behavior in response to pain. The person he’s biting or threatening might hurt him, after all, and you don’t want your dog to run off and leave you.
My personal preference is to use a plain collar of the sort you can hang the rabies tag on; rolled leather doesn’t wear away fur. If your dog only wears his collar with a leash, then a flat cloth collar is cheaper and works fine. If your dog DOES yank after squirrels, though, avoid plastic buckles, as they break easily. Using one of these collars means you cannot train with a lot of yank and jerk. You’ll have to use positive methods of voice, petting, and/or food. This often takes longer to get results, but those results tend to stick. Not only that, the behavior tends to transfer to off-leash obedience more readily.
I was originally trained to train dogs with a chain collar of the sort most people think of as the obedience collar. You used leverage and a yank to force the dog into position, usually after giving a command. What my collie — and a lot of other literal-minded dogs — concluded was that “Sit” meant “I’m about to yank upward on your neck and shove downward on your butt, so be ready to submit to that.” No initiative there, and no real clue what the word meant. I’ve seen people use prong collars (often called “training collars” in a blaze of brilliant marketing) to similar effect. Some dogs, particularly border collies and retrievers, actually figure this one out, which is why they’re considered the real obedience dogs by many trainers. Sadly, this is usually expressed in the sentence, “You should give up your _______ and get a real obedience dog.” The owner takes her perfectly-intelligent terrier or beagle home sadly and gives up obedience training instead.
Plenty of people get marvellous results out of shock collars. For one thing, the dog isn’t leash-dependent; you can force the beast to obey you at incredible ranges. However, it is still training a response out of fear of pain. Some dogs are too sensitive to wear one; some dogs don’t feel the things until they’re having convulsions. Some owners don’t want their dogs to fear pain, or inflict it on the animal they love. Also, some dogs get collar-savvy, and know perfectly well when they’re not wearing a shock collar. Suddenly they only obey when there’s the heft of a battery pack around their necks and they’ve already had a jolt from it.
The other thing to consider is that many training collars are not just causing a little pain at the moment, but long-term damage to the tissues of the dog’s neck. Is yours one of them? There’s a quick, easy, scientifically-viable way to find out, of course. Next time you sit down for an evening of television, fit your dog’s collar to the middle of your thigh. Every time a commercial starts — and I mean each commercial, not each commercial break — give yourself a leash correction. If you’re used to popping the lead on your dog more often than that, add a bonus pop every time the laugh track is triggered on M*A*S*H*, Homer says “D’oh!” or whatever suits your TV-watching habits. Do this every night, on the same leg, for a week. I’d be willing to bet that if you’re using a chain or a prong collar, by the end of the week you will be watching less TV and spending more time researching alternate training methods, and you don’t even have vertebrae or a windpipe in your thigh.
Have you tried on your dog’s training collar yet? What did you conclude?
I’d still say perform the leg test before putting it on your dog, and still stand by the list of observed drawbacks. There is no perfect collar. However, the e-collar dogs I’ve seen do not perform their obedience with enthusiasm. Hunting, maybe. Tracking, not the one I saw. Herding — well, rather mixed results there, depending on whether they were nicked for biting sheep or for ALL missed commands.
Note for readers: that IS an advertiser up there. Cheese used in a random-reinforcement program is also “a safe, effective, and humane way to train your dog.” It also creates a bond of communication instead of fear.
Thanks, Viktor! There’s a set of reference links up top, too, that you might find interesting, but mostly I just found that respecting my dog as a thinking creature seemed to get better results.