there a digsuting lazy way of dog training, anyone who use's one should NOT own a dog and should be reported.

a link from victoria stilwell a positive dog trainer, luckily over in the states re-educating. and if original poster still bangs on about them well words fail me, and you wouldnt even get within 200ft of mine.
http://www.squidoo.com/collars-shock

can i ask do you believe in dominance theory sorry couldn't help that, but seriously alpha role???. you do relise that theory is outdated and has been dubuffed.

I find this thread very upsetting, i have high drive working dogs that work and have never and would never put a collar on them. I've seen dogs wearing collars out on shoots, i don't see happy, waggy eager to please dogs, i see shut down, terrified nervous animals who are afraid of their owners and are doing their job out of fear,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, is this what we want to see 4 legged robots, personally i'd rather have the odd mistake and my imperfect happy dogs.

Who are we to suugest that its right to inflict pain on another living being to get them to do what WE want

Good morning Brierley,
What I turned my back on was punishment training, i.e., hammering a dog for being wrong before he had ever been shown how to be right, and before the right response had been conditioned thru teaching and repetition. Let me give you an example from my own experience. I don't know how much you know about retriever training so some of this may be superfluous, but please bear with me.

Dogs in conventional field trials (which are very different from hunt tests) lose points for "cheating water", i.e., going around water to a bird on the other side, rather than straight across, so these trainers "bank break" the dogs, train them to not bank run. This incident occurred when I was training with a conventional trialer, who was bank breaking two 11 month old pups, I had my young male. Both of her pups were on the ecollar as was mine, she ran her two first. She put a check cord on the first pup, and sent me to one side of a small round pond to throw the bird up onto the bank directly opposite the pup. She instructed me to grab the check cord if the dog landed part way across the pond and started to cheat, to prevent him from reaching the bird and thus getting rewarded for cheating. So far so good.

The pup started out straight and half way across made a 90 degree turn for the bank and landed, I grabbed the cord as instructed, and then everything went to hell. As soon as I had the cord, the trainer proceeded to light the dog up like the 4th of July. The only result was much screaming and thrashing around until I "accidently" dropped the cord, at which poiint the trainer recalled he pup and put him up. This "training" was repeated with his littermate with the same result.

So now it's my turn. The trainer started to hand me the cord and I told her I didn't need it, 'cause I was going to try something different. Now, I know two things about cheating; first, an intelligent dog with high drive will tend to run the bank not because he is a disobedient bonehead, but because it is the fastest way to the bird. Second, a dog will tend to repeat the initial line he took to a bird. Based on this knowledge, I had the first throw land in the middle of the pond; there was no percentage in cheating because the bird was so close to the dog, so Thunder swam straight to it. I had the second throw land at the edge of the water on the other side, directly in line with the first, and again Thunder went straight to it. The third throw was to the spot the trainer had started with for her dogs, again in line with the other two, but up onto the bank and back about 10' into cover where the dog could not see it, and once again my dog swam all the way across with no deviation from a dead straight line. If he had tried to cheat, my instruction to the thrower was to run over and pick up the bird so there was no reward for his (perfectly predictable and natural) error; no tickee, no washee. Then I would have repeated the teaching, increasing the distance to the bird in more gradual increments. As the dog got the idea, I would gradually make the test more challenging (increasing distances the dog had to swim, from the fall to the opposite bank, etc.), using the same techniques, and I would begin to generalize the learning to new venues. I would also be teaching the dog to handle so in the next step, I could stop him if he landed and cast him back into the water. Any dog with two functioning brain cells will quickly figure out that the fastest way to the reward is to do as I ask.

Note that I have dogs which have a very high degree of trainability, (comprised of intelligence, pack drive, attention, work ethic, etc.), because I breed for those traits, all of which greatly impact on the ease/difficulty of training. I learned a long time ago that training goes much more smoothly and happily with dogs which have these traits factory installed, and after-market installation is not an option; you ain't changing the DNA, you can only modify the behavior that is driven by it.

Collar correction has no place in these steps, because I am teachingby showing the dog what right is, by setting things up to make him successful, and by making the wrong response difficult and non-productive; this is the way I train everything. When I steady a dog, for example, I lay the foundation for off-leash steadiness. When I start testing what I have taught in the foundation, the thrower is instructed to beat the dog to the bird if he hears me bellow "sit", which indicates the dog broke. Again, the only "aversive" involved at this stage is the dog seeing that the reward of getting the bird is withheld if he fails to remain at heel until sent.

The trainer I described in the first scenario was going to encounter tests in competition that few dogs can pass (I once read that only 10 percent of dogs put into conventional trial training go on to compete successfully, and these are dogs costly, because they are from proven bloodlines, bred to do the job);if this is true, clearly these competitions represent examples of "asking too much" of many dogs. The trainers involved are getting big bucks and are under the gun to produce winners quickly; once again, it is all about the money. If the dog cannot survive the program, it is washed out and the owner is advised to get one which can. Attitudes re: training methods are indeed beginning to change, but is is a slow process which is hampered by the fact that some "unenlightened" trainers with dogs overbred on drive (and that's another topic) are successful; folks see that success and see no reason to try other methods. What they don't see is the carnage that preceded the success. Tragically, some of them would not care if they did see it, and even if their own dog was part of the collateral damage.

It would have done no good for me to point out to the trainer that her method of training of those pups was abusive. She was already po'd at me for my "accidents" with the check cord, and had been rewarded in the past for her methods by achieving some excellent results with their sire. She was doing what she had learned to do, and had seen achieve success. The best I could do was get the pups out from under the correction, and show the trainer an alternative way to achieve the desired result.

The title of this thread, started by you, is " Let's discuss training methods"

But you do not want to discuss training methods, do you. You want us to all agree with your barbarous conviction that e-collars are wonderful and the only way to train a dog.

Well I hate to disillusion you, but you ain't gonna win sunshine, because the majority of Dogsey members consider e-collars to be evil, wicked and cruel punishment.

Not training at all.

Here here Malka hun, and no reply to what the experts say about shock collars ect, but then she does believe in dominance theory enough said really. and no she isnt going to win a few who have tried have failed.

or maybe she's just trying to justify it to herself, its all been done before, and to be honest the sooner they are banned in this country the better, and thats from someone that moves in the circles where they ar commonly used and accepted

That sounds like the owners do not know how to use the collar properly, the trick is supposed to be that they don't assosiate the nick to the person or the collar they wear...

I would politely suggest that you, and the others who are anti-collar, are responding to the behavior of dogs you have seen/heard about, which have been trained via the punishment method described in my most recent post #164; please take the time to wade through it.

It is not my goal to produce robots (although that is certainly the goal of some conventional field trialers), because when hunting, I need a dog with a an intact brain, a dog that is not afraid to think for itself, and can solve problems with no input from me. Punishment training would be totally counter-productive to achieving my goal, which is that of teamwork, each of us with our own distinct job; if my dogs could drive to the swamp and shoot, they wouldn't need me to hunt, and if I possessed the ability to do things like swim through 100 yards of ice water and track down a crippled bird which had hidden in a brush pile far into the woods on the opposite bank, I would not need the dog. This is my view teamwork, get it? of My dogs are full partners in the field, not mindless robots, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Lizzy, do you participate in field trials with your dogs, and do you actually hunt them? Have you never encountered a situation in the course of these pursuits where the dog made the "mistake" of ignoring a fully trained command, a mistake that put the dog's very life in jeopardy? A simple yes or no will suffice for your answers to both questions.

RIGHT ON, INKLIVEEVA, RIGHT ON, thank you! that is certainly part of the idea, altho not the most important part, which is what they do associate it with; see some of my previous posts.