Guess, I'm thinking the same about yours

I can preempt your reply to save you a little time.

The dog who barked then bit after the shock associated the shock with the person at the fence.

The dog who wouldn't go back into the garden associated the shock with the environment

One major point to consider is that this is how the tool is used, whether you agree with it or not, by the majority of those owners who are either at the end of their tether or who want a quick fix.

Of course it's possible to avoid such associations, but even the most carefully introduced and applied physical aversive of any kind can result in such an effect.

I'm sure a lot have seen the dog who ducks every time the owner lifts an arm, not because it's been hit, but because a rattle bottle or squirt bottle has been used.

There are also the dogs who lean out away from the owner who has watched Caeser Millan and have adopted the 'pst, prod' as a way to control

You can create a situation where there is less chance of it happening, but you can't eliminate the possibility.

I abhor the deliberate use of physical correction in dog training. There's simply no need for it (and out of consideration for our sentient companions this is high on the agenda of why not to use them) and the fall-out can be unexpected and make matters far worse rather than better

I hold my hands up FL E collars have never been personally used by me so I have no personal experience.
However I used to work with a guy called Pete (Lovely man) who lived with his father. They took on a young German Shepherd and I daresay they would of described him as 'wifully disobedient' or 'imperfect' and I know they loved him too, after trying many training places they seeked the advice of a behaviourist who suggested a E collar ..... only to be used not as a punishment but a 'corrective tool' I advised Pete NOT to use it (after meeting the dog) as he was more fearful rather than trying to be top dog....anyway they went ahead and for a short time it did seem to have the right effect....until one day when his Father used the 'corrective tool' and the dog flew at him and attacked him....resulting in the German Shepherd being destroyed and the Father having a large part of his cheek and neck stitched back.
The ending of this story was '' All German Shepherds can not be trusted''...or thats how people saw it when Pete told everyone what had happened..........I noticed People never saw what really had happened to this dog before Pete and his Father took him on....(that the dog had already suffered through pain ) ...beaten, kicked, grabbed by the scruff etc
No I can not tell you MY personal experience of E Collars....but I can give you a wealth of experience on Border Collies that have been misplaced, or abused due to misplacement with serious issues....and I ended up owning them with pleasure in the end ....via trust and patience, not by inflicting more pain

Aw jeez Brierley, are you part of some conspiracy to deprive me of sleep or what?

High drive does present it's own unique set of challenges to training, as do many canine characteristics; but no way do I view it as an obstacle. I breed for it, and you betcha I use it, it is a wonderful motivator and reward. I am also able to use it to teach the dog that if they do as I ask, they will get the bird much faster than if they ignore my commands, which effectively eliminates the need for physical correction. I have used it for all kinds of training, including tracking, which by it's nature must be taught positively.

Remind me to give you some examples if you would like, and to tell you about the dog trained herself to do something she had not been taught - tomorrow!

Been there, done that - got too involved and passionate about a discussion that I've stayed up until silly-o'clock just to continue it and, as I've got older, I've realised it ain't worth it - as you'll probably see in the morning when you're all bleary eyed and stressed through an over-active brain causing restless sleep .

Morning Firstlight. Firstly please let me apologise for the rude parts of my post yesterday, I made the mistake of reading the entire thread before replying and got myself frustrated with the way it seemed to keep going round in circles. Secondly, thank you for the detailed response.

I'm not going to quote from the first message as people can read it for themselves. Your assessment of the pup jumping up and biting I agree with. The pup thought the approaching person had hurt it and responded in it's own way.

I used to walk wolves on weekends one of the things you were told prior to handling them is never allow them to hurt or scare themselves, obviously we would do our best to avoid this anyway. My point is, one the walks we did had electric fence on it. If a wolf caught itself on the electric fence it would not stop and blame itself, it would turn and blame the handler, sometimes with dire consequences. I'm guessing your response to that would be that it hasn't been conditioned to accept that it's the wolves fault it got zapped. Now what I'm curious about, having read your description of conditioning the dog, at what point does the dog really seem to start getting it? How many shocks, on average, does it take?

Let me try an example -

For me training one of my dogs to sit, stay. With the dog already knowing how to sit. I'll use Bandit is my dog.

I put Bandit in a sit and give the hand signal for stay. I then move away a few paces, pause, return to him, release him from his stay and reward him with a treat or toy.

If he breaks the stay I return him to the original spot with no reward and start again. Once he starts to get the command I will (and I know some won't agree with me here) introduce a 'ah' sound should he start to break the stay. This means that when I think he understands a stay but is thinking about moving I say 'ah' and he pretty much immediately will slam his butt back on the floor and continue waiting. I can then go back and reward him sufficiently, I will give him a jackpot reward if I don't need to use the 'ah' sound.

Now some would say that if I'm having to introduce the 'ah' then I have not conditioned the sit stay well enough and in some ways they are right but by having the word as an option I can push that bit further and also should he start to break a stay because of distractions in a potentially dangerous situation I have a back up word to really get him focused.

Bandit now has a spot on sit, stay using the giving or withholding of a reward. I have not had to inflict any sort of pain on him and I know if I put him in the middle of a field full of dogs he would still hold that stay because I have spent many hours conditioning it and if worse comes to worse I can use the 'ah' sound to regain his focus and remind him of what he's supposed to be doing.

You could almost say the 'ah' sound is a threat as if he thinks how you say he should he is thinking to himself 'ah' means stay there or don't get a treat.

Prior to using the e-collar do you make a sound? Am I right in thinking that the shock would be given in this instance when the 'ah' sound is made thus making a link between the two?

If I am right then I still see no need for the introduction of the e-collar in this instance. I say this because Bandit has learnt that if I have to say 'ah' he gets a lesser reward (as opposed to a shock) than if he sit-stays perfectly. I'm in someways punishing him by giving him kibble instead of cheese. He soon learns that if he wants the good stuff he has to do a good job.

Out of interest do you use a varied reward system with jackpots? I have found it to work really well with the animals I have trained. If they give me a slow recall they get one boring treat, recall straight away at speed and they get several really tasty treats. It doesn't take them long to put two and two together and they really start to work hard. Then over time I gradually fade the treats out.

"Unpleasant" and your idea of "correction" are punishment.
Nothing more, nothing less. Just punishment.

So you admit that you have burned a dog, albeit on "very rare" occasions.

No doubt from the barrel of a firearm.

Have a look at the top of this website.

DOGSEY
THE SITE FOR DOG LOVERS

Somehow you do not seem to be much of a dog lover to me.

I'll give you a bit of background on Malcolm that my help explain his behaviour better. Malcolm ended up in rescue at a young age p, somewhere up to a year old. He was neutered prior to coming to rescue so has never fully matured. Malcolm was severely collar shy. From the behaviours I have seen him exhibit on having his collar touched or neck area touched I have concluded that in his previous home he was regularly scruffed and beaten round the head. I say this because the two times I have had to catch him to stop him going somewhere (my dad left the front door open...) he has immediately sat down and thrashed his head from side to side with his eyes shut. The first time it happened he wet himself and because his tail was so far tucked under his belly he got it all over that as well. It was really horrible to see. In rescue he struggled to cope and spent 6 months in their care. They did everything the could with him to try to get him to relax but he was so stressed by the sounds of the other dogs barking he'd scream at them. They worked on his collar shyness and when I first met him he allowed my to stroke him and touch his collar but he was clearly unnerved by this. The result is that I took on an under socialised, abused, stressed out dog that I'm pretty sure would have gone mad if I hadn't walked in to those kennels and rescued him.

On to your response. I have taught Malcolm to pay attention to me but as he spent his first year or so not receiving any form of formal training expect a beating it's a slow process. He firstly had to be taught that training is fun and just that training is all about give and take. The rescue got some basic commands in him but because he hated his kennel so much he used to run to the other side of the paddocks the minute he realised they were taking him back.

One of the first things I did with Malcolm was make use of his love of tennis balls, he's not particularly food motivated so I sought an alternative. Malcolm loves to play fetch. In the rescue the used to stick him on a long line and throw one ball one way wait for him to come most of the way back and throw the other ball the other way, then go and retrieve the first ball. His toy manners were atrocious when I got him. My first step was to teach him that in order to get the tennis ball thrown he had to work for it. I used a longline and two tennis balls at first and I introduced him to the rule that if he wanted the ball thrown he had to come right back to me, sit and let me put my hand in his collar. This taught him several things in one go :
1. If you want something you have to look to me to get it.
2. Hands in collars result in nice things like playing fetch.
3. If you don't do what you are told you don't get the toy.

Now I'm not going to lie and say it was all plain sailing, when I first tried him off the long line in the paddock he knew and made damn sure I couldn't get close enough to him. This was made more difficult by the fact that he had a tennis ball so why did he need to one I had? I also learnt early on that if I even touched the lead he'd been gone and wouldn't come within 10ft of me. I managed this behaviour by putting him on the lead at random intervals on our walks so that he learnt the lead didn't signify the end of the walk but just another stage within it (this solved the bolting away from the lead that you mentioned in your post)

You are correct that I admit to not having a reliable recall on Malcolm and to be perfectly honest part of that is down to my laziness. I took him on at the beginning of winter so his walks primarily take place before and after work which at this time of year is in the dark and as a result I have got into a rut of going out to the fields where I work letting him off and playing fetch rather than working on any really training. However the example you gave of him running towards a busy road and failing to respond should never become an issue as I would never have him off lead near a busy road even if I felt he had reliable recall. By keeping on the lead and preventing the behaviour I am in some ways training it out of him as I am not giving him the opportunity to practice running off and when I do call him if he doesn't comeback I can real him in on his longline and make him come back. He still gets a treat if he has to be reeled in but he gets a really boring one in comparison to a spot on recall. This is the only real 'correction' he receives by with holding the best stuff for when he works really hard.

Malcolm's recall is already significantly better than it was when I got him as he will atleast now return to my feet and allow the lead to be put on instead of standing far enough away to evade capture. I am now at the point where I can really work on his recall but I had to overcome the other obstacles such as the collar shyness before I could even contemplate working on it with him.

Your high drive dog sounds desperate to work for you but I have to question what her motivation was for going back in to the water to retrieve that dummy? Had you used a shock collar on her? Was her desire to go back in the water part of her high drive or in fact a desperate need to avoid the shock she expected upon not completing a command?

Bandit loves to work for me (I raised him myself from 7 weeks old). He'll do anything asked of him straight away, no questions asked and he looks so happy the entire time he's doing it, it's a delight to see. He has been trained by consistency and rewards. He was clicker trained from the start and any behaviours he offered freely were marked and rewarded, such as walking to heel off lead. I now have a dog who is confident in any situation, desperate to please but he has never felt physical pain caused deliberately by a human being. He learns quicker than the abused dogs I have cared for as he has no fear of learning, the worst that's going to happen is he doesn't get his reward, so he can concentrate on the task at hand.

The case of the shock collar on the back of the neck of the gentleman I think boils down to him being taken by surprise. He had no time to register what was happening before he got shocked. It could as you say have been a faulty one or it could be that they turned it up I cannot say but I do not feel this is the case.

I have to admit the anecdote about the man with the e-collar in his lap made me wince and chuckle at the same time!

People have said that they don't have to use a shock collar to know it is abusive, and I agree with that. That was in part an answer to your question about who has seen a shock collar used.

The reason you don't want that answer, is because you can't build on it and keep the discussion going quite so easily Wys

I quite like this article:

http://www.squidoo.com/collars-shock

Poor stuffie though!

I like the point made about getting a shock collar user to let someone use it on them, with the other person putting it around the shock collar user's neck, and also handling the remote control; it's not said to be unkind but only as a good point made, I think. See here:

"- BUT Sometimes shock trainers seek to prove that the shock doesn't hurt by putting the collar on themselves.

They'll place the probes on the arm or hand. Here's a suggestion. If a shock trainer ever offers to do that, agree on the condition that they put the collar around their neck. And you get to hold the remote, set the magnitude, and administer the shock to them. You can make a game of it. You can teach the trainer a behavior. Wave your arms, push them into position, and zap them when they get it wrong. Let the shock collar do the talking. You decide when to shock and how high. If they don't learn fast enough or try to get away from you, dial up the shock.

Good luck. Almost no shock trainer will wear the collar and put the remote in someone else's hands".