Post by Shadowlands on Aug 12, 2011 17:48:29 GMT -5
Again, our rights as owners and trainers to use an effective TOOL are being challenged and we need to support our canadian neighbors any way we can ! because you know this stupidity is just one A/R extremist rant away. Here is a link to a anti-eCollar website - very well done too (wonder who paid for it?) - spreading all sorts of mis-information regarding the use of e-Collars, their is a place to leave comments - please be respectful and beat them to death with the facts!
www.banshockcollars.ca/policies.php
I posted the following response on line to this article -
Leaving that many dogs – loose – on their own – to make heirarchy pack decisions is just plain negligent. To leave a pack unsupervised for that length of time allowing them to “discipline” one another or to settle heirachy placement is just plain stupid.
Sorry – it does not matter “who” started it, or “what” the provocation was – this person is lucky there was not far worse collateral damage that day.
The sad thing now – is that the highest ranking pack member (obviously not the owner) – made a bad decision and both she and the owner will have to deal with the repercussions. I am left to wonder if she merrily went off to work the next day leaving the pack loose again – to reinforce the top’s dogs position of authority?
Stupid people doing stupid things will be the death nell for the rest of us responsible dog owners.
Please read below
Proposed e-collar ban in Canada
July 1, 2011 As you may know, a petition was introduced to parliament in Canada to consider enacting an e-collar ban in that country. As a result, renewed interest in promoting the benefits of the tool has begun in earnest both in Canada and the US. Right now, more than ever, it’s important to respond to charges that e-collars are (at best) ineffective and (at worst) abusive, and counter those charges with accurate information about e-collar use and case studies and stories depicting their effectiveness.
If you have such a story to share, or are even just of the same opinion that the ability to use this tool shouldn’t be taken away, please go to this Facebook page, like it, and share an account if you have one. The website that seems to be a driving force behind this ban is banshockcollars.ca. If you go to that last link, you’ll notice there’s a letter published from an anonymous source, “Ms. S.” from California. Please take a moment to read the content of her letter, followed by my open-letter response, below:
Alert to All Shock Collar Users
This is a very disturbing & sad report sent to us by a new supporter . She wants her story posted so no one else will ever have to experience a tragedy like this.
I hope this gets information out there that prevents the same tragedy for someone else with multiple dogs and gets these things banned. I have had complaints about barking from a previous neighbor and because I rent and foster dogs, I didn’t want to possibly lose my place to live or my dogs. I had tried several ways of deterring the barking but nothing seemed to work for long. The shock collar was the last resort to solving the problem and seemed to be working. I only put it on the one dog when I have to leave and take it off as soon as I get home. I haven’t seen any issues with the collar or her behavior so figured the problem was solved, as best as it could be.
Last week I was just finishing up at work when my neighbor called and said that she had heard a dog fight in my house and that I needed to get home as soon as possible. I was about 20 minutes away, so hurried home as fast as I could. When I pulled up, two of my neighbors said they heard a fight and screaming and the one neighbor said she went in the house and broke it up and covered up the one dog. Thank goodness I don’t lock my doors.
When I walked in three of the little dogs were outside and my dog wearing the collar was inside along with the injured dog and a foster I was caring for. Blood covered the whole floor and the bottom cupboard cabinets. There was a carpet askew and covered in blood and my injured dog was laying in a pool of blood on the doggie bed and whimpering. I tried to look at her injuries but she screamed, so I just covered her with another blanket and got her to the vet as soon as I could.
Without going into the grisly details, the vet said it was the worst injuries he’d ever seen. He did surgery and thought she was going to survive, but she succumbed to her injuries by the second night and passed away.
In assessing her injuries, I could tell it was the dog wearing the collar because she is the biggest one I have and she was covered in blood when I walked in. This is a dog that was best buddies with the dog she killed. After cleaning up the mess and assessing her slight injuries, I figure that the dog that was killed, my alpha Italian Greyhound, gave a warning to another dog and the bigger female that was wearing the collar, she is the peace keeper, probably tried to intervene and got shocked when she growled. This probably triggered her becoming aggressive toward her buddy and with the growling and barking only increased the shock and escalated the fight to having fatal consequences.
I work with dogs and am not a fan of pinch collars or ecollar training, but was desperate to get the barking issue under control. I have since started crating the dogs while I am gone. Had I known the risks to my babies, I never would have used the shock collar. Even when talking to the pet store employees about my options, the risk of a shock collar never came up. I went down there yesterday and talked to them and they never were told that during the recent training they had from the manufacturer.
Now I have lost my precious Ruka and Joy doesn’t understand what she did. The pack is hurting and my ability to foster dogs is under question. This was such a senseless tragedy. I hope somehow my story helps. Let me know if I can help in any other way.
Ms. S, California, USA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My response, an open letter to “Ms. S., California, USA” (7-01-11)
Dear Ms. S.,
Preemptively, let me say that I’m sorry for your loss, but I fervently disagree with your summary that (and I’m paraphrasing) “the shock collar did it.” I am going to be as kind and diplomatic as I can be, as I recognize you’ve endured a significant trauma and loss of a precious pet. However, in reading the anonymous letter that you wanted to be posted to the “banshockcollarsca” site, I see that a few other problems likely contributed to the tragedy you endured, and the hard truth is that you were directly in control of this outcome from start to finish and are solely responsible for what happened in your home on that day.
First of all, I need to respectfully point out that you weren’t there to see what actually happened first-hand. It seems that you’re guessing that the e-collar activated at some point and this was a catalyst for a fight.
Certainly you must be absolutely sure that this was the case in order to call on the sympathy of the general public and an outright ban on this product. How do you know for certain that the collar activated in the first place or what the circumstances surrounding the fight were? The fact is that you were 20 minutes away; you weren’t there. You’re making very serious allegations about a tool based on assumptions that have absolutely no way of being verified. Besides that, you’re presenting your story under the cloak of anonymity as you signed your letter with only an initial and a location in the United States. So how can anyone be sure that you experienced this incident as described? It wouldn’t be the first time a person working for an organization wrote a letter anonymously to attempt to promote a political agenda.
Why is your identity and the accuracy of your story important? Well, you’re using this story to support the elimination of the freedom and rights of a segment of the population, including dog owners, trainers, and electronic training device manufacturers. Taking away rights is not something to be treated lightly, and certainly not anonymously. Besides personal rights, we’re talking about an impact to the economy. According to Radio Systems Corporation industry research from 2007, US pet owners purchased more than 2 MILLION remote training devices, pet containment systems, and bark collars in 2006. And unit sales of electronic training devices are projected to reach 5 MILLION annually by 2014 according to the same research. The e-collars I typically use for training retail at $225 (and no, you can’t buy them at your local pet product store), with many devices being more expensive and some being less expensive. But let’s just use that number to calculate the impact if we banned electronic training devices. At 5 million units you’re looking at $1,125,000,000 impact to the economy. So if your letter has the potential to affect that kind of economic depression, I expect there to be a name attached.
Let’s assume you’re a real, live person and not someone working for an animal rights group, and take your story at face value. I need to get back to a very serious charge I made at the outset of this letter, that you, Ms. S, are solely responsible for the horrific events that took place at your home on that day. It’s a serious charge that I need to back up, but this is going to be difficult to hear. Based on the statement that you “only put it on the one dog when I have to leave and take it off as soon as I get home,” I’m going to make an assumption of my own, that you didn’t do any actual training with the bark collar and your dog. That you didn’t introduce the collar to the dog when he was alone so he could experience the sensation of the stim and learn that it wasn’t associated with your other dogs. Based on what you wrote, I’m assuming you did NOT do your due-diligence as a responsible dog owner. Rather, it sounds like you simply went down to your local pet product store and took the training and product advice from a store clerk.
There’s more to understanding how to safely and effectively use an e-collar, including the risks associated with MIS-USE, than simply asking the kid at the pet product store. Respectfully I’d tell you, you did not do your due diligence. Do not blame your dog’s death on a tool that you had the responsibility to learn how to use properly first. How can I say that to Ms. S., an anonymous letter writer that we’re assuming is a real person in California, USA, who has just lost her pet dog and as a result of this tragedy is supporting an e-collar ban in Canada, which will have no direct impact on her unless she is planning to move there?
Well, the fact of the matter is that e-collars are used safely and effectively to proactively train and manage dog behavior problems of (according to the previously mentioned numbers) the dogs in somewhere between 2 million and 5 million households across the US every day—and that’s just the US. Let’s assume an extraordinarily and completely unrealistically high number of those users were dissatisfied with their electronic training devices and experienced something along the lines of Ms. S’s tragedy. For ease of mathematics, we’ll say half. That still leaves between 1 and 2.5 million happy electronic device using households across the US.
E-collar trainers such as myself can attest to these happy users. We work with them every day. In fact, e-collars have indeed SAVED lives…saved the lives of dogs that were otherwise condemned to die based on a difficult behavior problem that the owner, for whatever reason, had been unable to fix with other tools or methods. Many people use the e-collar as a “tool of last resort,” as Ms. S states she did, and when these owners are properly educated on the use of the tool, ideally instructed by a professional, their results are the polar opposite of what Ms. S experienced. They experience a better-behaved dog that is reliable at home and in public. In fact, you can go to I love my e-collar and so does my dog to read stories and testimonies from happy e-collar users.
Another reason I feel this tragedy rests squarely on Ms. S’s shoulders is that it would seem there were at least 6 dogs, at least three of whom were “small dogs” based on this passage of the letter: “When I walked in three of the little dogs were outside and my dog wearing the collar was inside along with the injured dog and a foster I was caring for.” (The precise details regarding the number of dogs, sizes, breeds, and sexes involved in the story are a bit murky.) While I don’t know you or your pack, it’s concerning to me that you had 6 dogs in an unlocked home or apartment, all free-roaming and mingling without supervision.
Most professionals, and even the average dog owner, would agree this is a potential problem waiting to happen. I am going to step out on a limb and guess, if we’re being absolutely honest, that there had been some disagreements between dogs in your household in the past, possibly minor skirmishes that needed to be broken up. And maybe this didn’t seem like such a big deal to you at the time. I am not questioning your good intentions in fostering and attempting to care for dogs, but I am seriously questioning your judgment in allowing this many dogs all together unsupervised for what I assume to be an extended period of time (maybe between 4 and 8 hours since you were at work) behind unlocked doors, and throwing an e-collar into the mix without preemptive training with the dog to help him understand the sensation and how to turn off the collar.
This would be tantamount to me not taking driver’s education courses, purchasing a Toyota Camry without knowing how to safely operate it much less what the rules of the road were, driving it into a tree, then blaming Toyota for my accident and writing an anonymous letter calling for the ban of all dangerous Toyota Camrys! Sounds ridiculous, no?
While I place 100% responsibility on Ms. S from California for the death of her dog because of mismanagement of her pack and misuse of a powerful training device, I also acknowledge that it would have been better if she hadn’t been able to go down to her local pet supply store and purchase and use this tool on the advice of a sales clerk. Most people would recognize the potential to use the tool incorrectly with significant consequences, and that they might mitigate their risk by involving a professional in the process. But clearly this wasn’t Ms. S’s line of thinking—and there are a lot of Ms. S’s out there.
Unfortunately, trying to regulate an individual’s lack of common sense, accountability, or intelligence by banning a tool that has been shown time and time again to HELP dogs overcome behavior problems and become well-adjusted, obedient, and mannerly based on the case studies and results obtained by dog trainers that successfully utilize this tool is not a very good way to ensure that intelligence or common sense will rule the day.
These same people that we wish would have never gotten it into their head to try to use the tool without professional help in the first place will find another way to put their dogs at risk—perhaps by affixing a head halter to the dog and allowing it to run full-throttle to the end of s 20-foot flexi lead, hit the end at maximum velocity, and have its neck snapped back, thereby slipping a disk. Or maybe over-feeding the dog or allowing it to chew on a plastic water bottle until it’s broken into pieces, ingests the sharp pieces, and requires emergency surgery to have the pieces removed before they tear up the dog’s intestines. There are so many ways that a person who doesn’t know what they’re doing in training and managing their dog can either emotionally or physically damage a dog. To blame one tool and call for its complete ban simply doesn’t wash.
Every e-collar trainer I know will tell you that Ms. S missed out on an important training opportunity with her dog and could tell you how she could have done things differently to get a much different result. It would begin with advising the owner to purchase a higher quality collar that wasn’t activated by anything EXCEPT the sound of the wearer’s bark, proceed with the owner investing some time to teach the dog what the e-collar meant and how to turn it off by stopping barking, and would also involve managing the dogs’ whereabouts while the owner was away so as not to allow the potential for a fight to happen in the first place. And every e-collar trainer I know acknowledges that it’s people like Ms. S that besmirch the e-collar’s reputation and place it in jeopardy of being banned outright.
E-collar users would be open to talking about regulating the tool to some degree—but when you place the tool in the cross-hairs of an outright ban and use stories such as Ms. S’s to support such extreme action, it simply makes no logical sense and actually poses a risk to many dogs and their owners that have realized the benefits of the e-collar in the happy tail and wide grin of a dog running safely and freely off-leash, or being able to be calm and comfortable in a crate they initially found to be anxiety-inducing, or the relief in the voice of an owner that is now able to keep their companion when they had thought they might have to give her up due to a difficult behavior issue such as aggression.
How about instead of going right for the ban, we have an open dialogue about the e-collar as a training tool, both the negatives AND the positives, and try to come up with a way to promote the positive aspects of the tool and mitigate the negatives or consequences of improper use?
I do hope Ms. S. reads this response as I feel it’s important for her to be aware of how her actions directly impacted the events of that day, rather than being allowed to pass off blame on a training tool. That’s why I couldn’t let this account stand without responding–because at no point does she acknowledge that she had some responsibility in this matter, rather, she makes assumptions and guesses at what actually happened. Passing off blame is an epidemic in our society, especially where kids and pets are concerned–seems like it’s always someone ELSE’S fault when things go wrong, and there’s simply no place for it when it comes to responsible dog ownership. If Ms. S. is not made aware of how the consequences of HER actions impacted her dogs that day, I have very real concerns for the dogs that remain in her care.
–Sarah Smith
www.banshockcollars.ca/policies.php
I posted the following response on line to this article -
Leaving that many dogs – loose – on their own – to make heirarchy pack decisions is just plain negligent. To leave a pack unsupervised for that length of time allowing them to “discipline” one another or to settle heirachy placement is just plain stupid.
Sorry – it does not matter “who” started it, or “what” the provocation was – this person is lucky there was not far worse collateral damage that day.
The sad thing now – is that the highest ranking pack member (obviously not the owner) – made a bad decision and both she and the owner will have to deal with the repercussions. I am left to wonder if she merrily went off to work the next day leaving the pack loose again – to reinforce the top’s dogs position of authority?
Stupid people doing stupid things will be the death nell for the rest of us responsible dog owners.
Please read below
Proposed e-collar ban in Canada
July 1, 2011 As you may know, a petition was introduced to parliament in Canada to consider enacting an e-collar ban in that country. As a result, renewed interest in promoting the benefits of the tool has begun in earnest both in Canada and the US. Right now, more than ever, it’s important to respond to charges that e-collars are (at best) ineffective and (at worst) abusive, and counter those charges with accurate information about e-collar use and case studies and stories depicting their effectiveness.
If you have such a story to share, or are even just of the same opinion that the ability to use this tool shouldn’t be taken away, please go to this Facebook page, like it, and share an account if you have one. The website that seems to be a driving force behind this ban is banshockcollars.ca. If you go to that last link, you’ll notice there’s a letter published from an anonymous source, “Ms. S.” from California. Please take a moment to read the content of her letter, followed by my open-letter response, below:
Alert to All Shock Collar Users
This is a very disturbing & sad report sent to us by a new supporter . She wants her story posted so no one else will ever have to experience a tragedy like this.
I hope this gets information out there that prevents the same tragedy for someone else with multiple dogs and gets these things banned. I have had complaints about barking from a previous neighbor and because I rent and foster dogs, I didn’t want to possibly lose my place to live or my dogs. I had tried several ways of deterring the barking but nothing seemed to work for long. The shock collar was the last resort to solving the problem and seemed to be working. I only put it on the one dog when I have to leave and take it off as soon as I get home. I haven’t seen any issues with the collar or her behavior so figured the problem was solved, as best as it could be.
Last week I was just finishing up at work when my neighbor called and said that she had heard a dog fight in my house and that I needed to get home as soon as possible. I was about 20 minutes away, so hurried home as fast as I could. When I pulled up, two of my neighbors said they heard a fight and screaming and the one neighbor said she went in the house and broke it up and covered up the one dog. Thank goodness I don’t lock my doors.
When I walked in three of the little dogs were outside and my dog wearing the collar was inside along with the injured dog and a foster I was caring for. Blood covered the whole floor and the bottom cupboard cabinets. There was a carpet askew and covered in blood and my injured dog was laying in a pool of blood on the doggie bed and whimpering. I tried to look at her injuries but she screamed, so I just covered her with another blanket and got her to the vet as soon as I could.
Without going into the grisly details, the vet said it was the worst injuries he’d ever seen. He did surgery and thought she was going to survive, but she succumbed to her injuries by the second night and passed away.
In assessing her injuries, I could tell it was the dog wearing the collar because she is the biggest one I have and she was covered in blood when I walked in. This is a dog that was best buddies with the dog she killed. After cleaning up the mess and assessing her slight injuries, I figure that the dog that was killed, my alpha Italian Greyhound, gave a warning to another dog and the bigger female that was wearing the collar, she is the peace keeper, probably tried to intervene and got shocked when she growled. This probably triggered her becoming aggressive toward her buddy and with the growling and barking only increased the shock and escalated the fight to having fatal consequences.
I work with dogs and am not a fan of pinch collars or ecollar training, but was desperate to get the barking issue under control. I have since started crating the dogs while I am gone. Had I known the risks to my babies, I never would have used the shock collar. Even when talking to the pet store employees about my options, the risk of a shock collar never came up. I went down there yesterday and talked to them and they never were told that during the recent training they had from the manufacturer.
Now I have lost my precious Ruka and Joy doesn’t understand what she did. The pack is hurting and my ability to foster dogs is under question. This was such a senseless tragedy. I hope somehow my story helps. Let me know if I can help in any other way.
Ms. S, California, USA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My response, an open letter to “Ms. S., California, USA” (7-01-11)
Dear Ms. S.,
Preemptively, let me say that I’m sorry for your loss, but I fervently disagree with your summary that (and I’m paraphrasing) “the shock collar did it.” I am going to be as kind and diplomatic as I can be, as I recognize you’ve endured a significant trauma and loss of a precious pet. However, in reading the anonymous letter that you wanted to be posted to the “banshockcollarsca” site, I see that a few other problems likely contributed to the tragedy you endured, and the hard truth is that you were directly in control of this outcome from start to finish and are solely responsible for what happened in your home on that day.
First of all, I need to respectfully point out that you weren’t there to see what actually happened first-hand. It seems that you’re guessing that the e-collar activated at some point and this was a catalyst for a fight.
Certainly you must be absolutely sure that this was the case in order to call on the sympathy of the general public and an outright ban on this product. How do you know for certain that the collar activated in the first place or what the circumstances surrounding the fight were? The fact is that you were 20 minutes away; you weren’t there. You’re making very serious allegations about a tool based on assumptions that have absolutely no way of being verified. Besides that, you’re presenting your story under the cloak of anonymity as you signed your letter with only an initial and a location in the United States. So how can anyone be sure that you experienced this incident as described? It wouldn’t be the first time a person working for an organization wrote a letter anonymously to attempt to promote a political agenda.
Why is your identity and the accuracy of your story important? Well, you’re using this story to support the elimination of the freedom and rights of a segment of the population, including dog owners, trainers, and electronic training device manufacturers. Taking away rights is not something to be treated lightly, and certainly not anonymously. Besides personal rights, we’re talking about an impact to the economy. According to Radio Systems Corporation industry research from 2007, US pet owners purchased more than 2 MILLION remote training devices, pet containment systems, and bark collars in 2006. And unit sales of electronic training devices are projected to reach 5 MILLION annually by 2014 according to the same research. The e-collars I typically use for training retail at $225 (and no, you can’t buy them at your local pet product store), with many devices being more expensive and some being less expensive. But let’s just use that number to calculate the impact if we banned electronic training devices. At 5 million units you’re looking at $1,125,000,000 impact to the economy. So if your letter has the potential to affect that kind of economic depression, I expect there to be a name attached.
Let’s assume you’re a real, live person and not someone working for an animal rights group, and take your story at face value. I need to get back to a very serious charge I made at the outset of this letter, that you, Ms. S, are solely responsible for the horrific events that took place at your home on that day. It’s a serious charge that I need to back up, but this is going to be difficult to hear. Based on the statement that you “only put it on the one dog when I have to leave and take it off as soon as I get home,” I’m going to make an assumption of my own, that you didn’t do any actual training with the bark collar and your dog. That you didn’t introduce the collar to the dog when he was alone so he could experience the sensation of the stim and learn that it wasn’t associated with your other dogs. Based on what you wrote, I’m assuming you did NOT do your due-diligence as a responsible dog owner. Rather, it sounds like you simply went down to your local pet product store and took the training and product advice from a store clerk.
There’s more to understanding how to safely and effectively use an e-collar, including the risks associated with MIS-USE, than simply asking the kid at the pet product store. Respectfully I’d tell you, you did not do your due diligence. Do not blame your dog’s death on a tool that you had the responsibility to learn how to use properly first. How can I say that to Ms. S., an anonymous letter writer that we’re assuming is a real person in California, USA, who has just lost her pet dog and as a result of this tragedy is supporting an e-collar ban in Canada, which will have no direct impact on her unless she is planning to move there?
Well, the fact of the matter is that e-collars are used safely and effectively to proactively train and manage dog behavior problems of (according to the previously mentioned numbers) the dogs in somewhere between 2 million and 5 million households across the US every day—and that’s just the US. Let’s assume an extraordinarily and completely unrealistically high number of those users were dissatisfied with their electronic training devices and experienced something along the lines of Ms. S’s tragedy. For ease of mathematics, we’ll say half. That still leaves between 1 and 2.5 million happy electronic device using households across the US.
E-collar trainers such as myself can attest to these happy users. We work with them every day. In fact, e-collars have indeed SAVED lives…saved the lives of dogs that were otherwise condemned to die based on a difficult behavior problem that the owner, for whatever reason, had been unable to fix with other tools or methods. Many people use the e-collar as a “tool of last resort,” as Ms. S states she did, and when these owners are properly educated on the use of the tool, ideally instructed by a professional, their results are the polar opposite of what Ms. S experienced. They experience a better-behaved dog that is reliable at home and in public. In fact, you can go to I love my e-collar and so does my dog to read stories and testimonies from happy e-collar users.
Another reason I feel this tragedy rests squarely on Ms. S’s shoulders is that it would seem there were at least 6 dogs, at least three of whom were “small dogs” based on this passage of the letter: “When I walked in three of the little dogs were outside and my dog wearing the collar was inside along with the injured dog and a foster I was caring for.” (The precise details regarding the number of dogs, sizes, breeds, and sexes involved in the story are a bit murky.) While I don’t know you or your pack, it’s concerning to me that you had 6 dogs in an unlocked home or apartment, all free-roaming and mingling without supervision.
Most professionals, and even the average dog owner, would agree this is a potential problem waiting to happen. I am going to step out on a limb and guess, if we’re being absolutely honest, that there had been some disagreements between dogs in your household in the past, possibly minor skirmishes that needed to be broken up. And maybe this didn’t seem like such a big deal to you at the time. I am not questioning your good intentions in fostering and attempting to care for dogs, but I am seriously questioning your judgment in allowing this many dogs all together unsupervised for what I assume to be an extended period of time (maybe between 4 and 8 hours since you were at work) behind unlocked doors, and throwing an e-collar into the mix without preemptive training with the dog to help him understand the sensation and how to turn off the collar.
This would be tantamount to me not taking driver’s education courses, purchasing a Toyota Camry without knowing how to safely operate it much less what the rules of the road were, driving it into a tree, then blaming Toyota for my accident and writing an anonymous letter calling for the ban of all dangerous Toyota Camrys! Sounds ridiculous, no?
While I place 100% responsibility on Ms. S from California for the death of her dog because of mismanagement of her pack and misuse of a powerful training device, I also acknowledge that it would have been better if she hadn’t been able to go down to her local pet supply store and purchase and use this tool on the advice of a sales clerk. Most people would recognize the potential to use the tool incorrectly with significant consequences, and that they might mitigate their risk by involving a professional in the process. But clearly this wasn’t Ms. S’s line of thinking—and there are a lot of Ms. S’s out there.
Unfortunately, trying to regulate an individual’s lack of common sense, accountability, or intelligence by banning a tool that has been shown time and time again to HELP dogs overcome behavior problems and become well-adjusted, obedient, and mannerly based on the case studies and results obtained by dog trainers that successfully utilize this tool is not a very good way to ensure that intelligence or common sense will rule the day.
These same people that we wish would have never gotten it into their head to try to use the tool without professional help in the first place will find another way to put their dogs at risk—perhaps by affixing a head halter to the dog and allowing it to run full-throttle to the end of s 20-foot flexi lead, hit the end at maximum velocity, and have its neck snapped back, thereby slipping a disk. Or maybe over-feeding the dog or allowing it to chew on a plastic water bottle until it’s broken into pieces, ingests the sharp pieces, and requires emergency surgery to have the pieces removed before they tear up the dog’s intestines. There are so many ways that a person who doesn’t know what they’re doing in training and managing their dog can either emotionally or physically damage a dog. To blame one tool and call for its complete ban simply doesn’t wash.
Every e-collar trainer I know will tell you that Ms. S missed out on an important training opportunity with her dog and could tell you how she could have done things differently to get a much different result. It would begin with advising the owner to purchase a higher quality collar that wasn’t activated by anything EXCEPT the sound of the wearer’s bark, proceed with the owner investing some time to teach the dog what the e-collar meant and how to turn it off by stopping barking, and would also involve managing the dogs’ whereabouts while the owner was away so as not to allow the potential for a fight to happen in the first place. And every e-collar trainer I know acknowledges that it’s people like Ms. S that besmirch the e-collar’s reputation and place it in jeopardy of being banned outright.
E-collar users would be open to talking about regulating the tool to some degree—but when you place the tool in the cross-hairs of an outright ban and use stories such as Ms. S’s to support such extreme action, it simply makes no logical sense and actually poses a risk to many dogs and their owners that have realized the benefits of the e-collar in the happy tail and wide grin of a dog running safely and freely off-leash, or being able to be calm and comfortable in a crate they initially found to be anxiety-inducing, or the relief in the voice of an owner that is now able to keep their companion when they had thought they might have to give her up due to a difficult behavior issue such as aggression.
How about instead of going right for the ban, we have an open dialogue about the e-collar as a training tool, both the negatives AND the positives, and try to come up with a way to promote the positive aspects of the tool and mitigate the negatives or consequences of improper use?
I do hope Ms. S. reads this response as I feel it’s important for her to be aware of how her actions directly impacted the events of that day, rather than being allowed to pass off blame on a training tool. That’s why I couldn’t let this account stand without responding–because at no point does she acknowledge that she had some responsibility in this matter, rather, she makes assumptions and guesses at what actually happened. Passing off blame is an epidemic in our society, especially where kids and pets are concerned–seems like it’s always someone ELSE’S fault when things go wrong, and there’s simply no place for it when it comes to responsible dog ownership. If Ms. S. is not made aware of how the consequences of HER actions impacted her dogs that day, I have very real concerns for the dogs that remain in her care.
–Sarah Smith