Collar and Harness options

As I sit here working on my class plans, I am always reminded of the “collar” issue. I state in all of my posts and literature, I do not allow choke chains, prong collars, or shock collars in my class. Preferably, I wish they would be taken off of the market and not even available to debate.

Thankfully, ideas and common sense have progressed over the years and new studies show your dog doesn’t like to be harmed while training. Hurting them so they submit to you is not a wonderful way to train.

Instead, if you train with a reward based system, your dog will love working for you. Thus no hurting and submission needed, If someone gave you a really high value reward every time you did something correctly, wouldn’t you want to keep doing what you were being rewarded for? Hence, the reward or positive reinforcement training method.

I love body harnesses on the dogs. Especially when you are just starting training. Once your dog has their manners under control, you can always go back to using just a flat or rolled collar. However, I find that when we are teaching our furry friend how to be polite in public, they tend to pull, sometimes quite forcefully, and if they are only wearing a collar that the leash is attached to, many times we can damage their wind pipe.

There is a wonderful  article  that I saw today about many of the collar/harness options and why they may have worked in the past and why some are better than others in our day and age. It is a long article but well worth the read. I hope it helps bring some understanding to you about why I am adamant on the tools I allow you to use in class.