Electronic Dog Collar – the Truth About Shock Collars

Some people think that the idea behind using electronic dog collar on dogs is to use painful electric shocks to instill fear, which in turn will make the dog afraid to engage in a particular behavior. That’s a stretch of phrasing right there – as though a particularly malevolent quality of pain is needed; the truth is the static shock is only needed to interrupt and later on prevent a dog from engaging in nuisance barking. But to a dog, such low volt shock is enough to jolt it out of its non-stop barking or any bad behavior it’s gotten the habit of doing over and over.

There is no mention here about debilitating pain as being a needed condition. Remember that the low volt shock is so low it’s only annoying at the most, so the dog doesn’t get hurt. Any training regiment using static correction collars only aims to instill a learned, conditioned response – a bark is followed by an unpleasant experience.

There are two (2) kinds of shock or static correction collars. The first one is activated by both the sound made by a bark and the vibrations of the throat of the dog. This allows for secure activation – the collar will trigger only at your dog’s bark, since it can discriminate between the bark and other sounds nearby. Another kind makes use of a transmitter roughly the size of a small cellular phone – that unit is called the transmitter and the receiver in a device on a special dog collar. The bark-triggered collar works indoors and outdoors, but its limitation is that it only triggers after a bark, and not after other types of behavior.

Since there are many other dog behavior you may disapprove of – from merely annoying to disturbing – you’re going to need to the other type of collar. The exact moment you’re dog is about to or just performed an unwanted behavior, you can activate the collar to send the static shock message – you don’t approve of that behavior. This shows just how useful remote dog collars can be, as they can be utilized in just about any obedience training routine. From pet containment and anti-barking to hunting routines and agility training, there are a lot of possibilities.

This idea of using an annoying stimulus, like a static shock, to interrupt a dog’s behavior is also present in other dog collars. The dog collars that do not use shock stimuli are spray types (which use a harmless chemical released in the form of a spray) and sound types (which emits a high-pitched sound only dogs can hear).

Just give it some time – but in the long run you’ll see how the dog figures out the causal link between the behavior you want to weed out and the static shocks that keep annoying your dog. The initial time spent with the electronic dog collar, expect your dog to act weird as it gets used to the sudden annoyance each time it engages in an unwanted behavior – over time it will figure out it’s not supposed to do those annoying little things.