Originally Posted by
Dobionekenobi
I think this sums up my problem with E-collars. How on earth does one know what their dog's pain threshold is? Even in humans pain is hard to measure and varies from one person to the next and from one moment to the next. I certainly know that depending on how I am feeling physically and emotionally and depending on the situation my own personal pain levels can change massively.
Unfortunately my dog cannot verbalise in English exactly how uncomfortable something like a shock is and since we have outlawed giving human beings any shock treatment without their approval I don't think it's acceptable to use it on an animal that has no choice.
By the time I employ the collar I have a pretty good idea of what a dog's threshold is, via observation of their reaction to accidental aversives of a random nature; it ain't brain surgery.
In the case of the dog described, it was pretty easy to conclude that she had a high one the day I observed the following: She was not fully grown, and was done up to a 4' chain (read not enough slack to gain momentum and apply a lot of force to it), and she bolted. She hit the end of that chain so hard that she ripped the d-ring right out of a brand new, double-layer leather collar (no defects in the collar, she actually broke the nylon stitching and tore the leather),
and stripped the threads on the quick link attaching the snap to the chain and separated the two parts of the link. She obviously took a very strong shot, it was a blue-eyed wonder she didn't break her neck; her response to that aversive was a very slight break in speed, and subsequent acceleration to mach 7. If I didn't already know she had a high pain threshold before that incident, I certainly would have after seeing this. I have tons of examples of this with different dogs, some of which involved an even stronger aversive this dog got: I already recounted one in a previous post re: the dog who lacerated her shoulder by deliberately bashing into barbed wire.
Dogs don't verbalize in ANY spoken language because they lack the necessary equipment. As I am sure you know, they
do communicate via vocalizations and body language, and it is an absolute necessity that a trainer develop the ability to read and correctly interpret the dog's communications (see the quote in my sig).
I am not measuring pain, I am looking at the dog's
response to it. Dogs with high drive often have high pain thresholds, I would be surprised if they didn't. Sporting dogs with low pain tolerance would not last long in the field, because they encounter naturally occurring painful situations all the time e.g., downed bird in a tangle of briars. Even dogs who are strictly pets experience accidental/unintentional aversives, have you never seen a pet get stung by a bee, or step on sharp rock, or twist a limb in a direction it was not meant to go? The amazing thing is, dogs actually learn from these bolt-from-the-blue aversives (i.e., they have
no previous training in how to
avoid them).
What happens with things like a bee sting is a hard lesson, and is what I would consider to be training via punishment, because the dog has no training to give it the ability to avoid the sting, and no choice with regard to whether it gets stung or not, and the message is not "Go do something I have taught you to do", it is "Stop messing with me
right now"; the bee's gonna do what bees do. Punishment can certainly produce a response which interferes with daily activity, and/or is dangerous for the dog, e.g.,the dog that gets stung by a bee responds by bolting out of the county in fear when it even hears/sees a bee, or refuses to eat because the sting occurred near it's food bowl.
Yes, Nature has programmed dogs to learn via punishment, and it is a very simple, and harsh, method; do a behavior which is rewarded with a pleasing result, go ahead and repeat it; do a behavior which produces an unpleasant result, better think twice about repeating it. This is the point I was going in my post about dominance displays; the post was not about "dominance theory", but about how dogs are trained and learn within the pack. The misinterpretation of folks like promarc was perfectly understandable, because I got sidetracked and never finished the post, mea culpa.
Punishment training can be a very effective way to
stop an behavior, but it is a poor and often destructive method for motivating/teaching a dog to
do something, for a lot of reasons in addition to the one I gave above. My Alpha dog made this point abundantly clear to me early on, and he was the instigator of me developing the "method" I use today, God bless him.