E-Collars for Dogs
What is an E-Collar for dogs?
An E-collar is a remote-controlled collar that delivers an electronic stim to the dog’s neck. In psychology, this is called a positive punishment. This means something is being added that the dog views as unpleasant. I prefer the Dogtra collar due to is 127 levels of adjustment.
Why are E-Collars used?
There are many reasons to use an E-collar, the issue arises when people do not understand operant conditioning, learned helplessness, fear response, and ethology. People put an e-collar on a dog and expect the dog to know what to do when they are stimulated with the collar. In the study published in 1953 Traumatic Avoidance Learning: Acquisition In Normal Dogs’ they discuss the importance of teaching avoidance when using punishment;
“An experiment in traumatic avoidance learning is reported in which dogs were trained to avoid a just-subtetanizing shock by responding to a signal which preceded the shock by a period of 10 seconds. A shuttle-box jumping response was reinforced as the instrumental avoidance reaction. The dogs received ten trials per day with a 3-min. interval between trials. The results can be stated briefly: (1) During the escape phase of learning, when the animals were receiving shocks because they were not “anticipating,” the latency of the jumping response decreased rapidly and did not change significantly after the third trial. (2) The first avoidance response, a response to the signal having a latency of less than to seconds, appeared (on the average) on the fifth trial; it was preceded at about the third trial by the appearance of conditioned emotional reaction to the signal. (3) The latency of the first avoidance response represented an abrupt decrease from the escape reaction latencies preceding it. (4) After the first avoidance trial the latency of avoidance responses continued to decrease in an orderly manner, while the latencies of the escape reactions did not change.” (Solomon 1953).
This is why people who do not know what they are doing will say a dog is just being stubborn when they do not respond to an e-collar.
Why do some dogs not respond to an e-collar?
A dog that does not understand the command and does not know why it is getting an e-collar correction or how to make the correction stop will either go into fight-flight or freeze. This is learned helplessness in the above-referenced study this was observed with the dogs that were not trained to escape the shocked box.
Can an E-collar for dogs be used humanely?
Absolutely, at Species K9 we use the e-collar in 3rd phase after the dog understands what is expected when given a command, how to escape the e-collar, and only at a level appropriate for the situation. We never want the dog to go into flight or fight mode. This is not learning, this is abuse. Having something that is more motivational for the dog then whatever is causing them to break the command is important for learning as proven in operant conditioning. To learn more contract us today.
Work Cited
Solomon, R. L., Kamin, L. J., & Wynne, L. C. (1953). Traumatic avoidance learning: the outcomes of several extinction procedures with dogs. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 48(2), 291–302. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0058943