Ecollars

[Donald McCaig]

Dear Doggers,

 

Patrick Burns has a nice overview of the article. http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2014/10/all-dog-training-systems-pass-minimum.html

 

Donald McCaig

[Eileen Stein]

Ignoring distractions and focusing on the task at hand is not the same thing as not being willing (or able) to interact with the environment. The dogs who are less interactive with their environments don't make a lot of decisions on their own, try new things, and tend generally to lack confidence.

 

I agree with the first sentence, but not the second. I think you would need to know what is meant in this study by "interactive with their environments" before you could even begin to generalize about dogs that are so described.

 

The study report said:

 

 

Two further aspects of training were found to differ between Group C and both Groups A and B. These were the number of commands given, where dogs in Groups A and B appeared to receive about twice as many commands per training sessions than dogs in Group C (Table S5 in File S2) and sniffing or environmental interactions, which occurred at about half the rate in Groups A and B, then in dogs in Group C.

[Emphasis added]

 

Was there any other place in the report where "environmental interactions" were defined or described? If so, I missed it, and would appreciate a cite. If not, how on earth do we know whether these "environmental interactions" were of a desirable or undesirable kind? We don't even know the context in which they occurred. Perhaps the dogs WERE succumbing to distractions and/or avoiding focusing on the task at hand. Sniffing can certainly be an avoidance behavior in many situations. I just don't understand the basis for concluding that these "environmental interactions" are ipso facto positive rather than negative.

 

ETA: Donald, didn't mean to distract from your link to Terrierman's comments about the study. Your post just brought me back to this thread and reminded me of one problem I'd had with the study report and its interpretations.

[Mark Billadeau]

I would view this study as a feasibility study; a quick look see to determine if there was anything significantly different. The n is really way too small to assess for anything but very gross differences in how effective one training method is over another. Plus the study didn't assess how quickly dogs could be trained or how long the dogs retained the training for each method.

 

Do you think 21 dogs trained for 5-6days is really enough dogs and time to establish effectiveness of a training method and then use these data to compare training methods?

 

Let's do an analogy. Do you think two 15min sessions over 5-6days of using a new teaching method on 21 second graders is enough to evaluate the effectiveness of that new teaching method?

[GentleLake]

Haven't had a chance to read these yet, but saw this list of studies on another site:

 

• Considerations for shock and ‘training’ collars: Concerns from and for the working dog community (Overall) Journal of Veterinary Behavior (2007) 2, 103-107
• Training Dogs With the Help of the Shock Collar: short and long term behavioural effects(Schilder, van der Borg) Applied Animal Behaviour Science 85 (2004) 319–334
• Can aggression in dogs be elicited through the use of electronic pet containment systems? (Polsky) Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 2000 Vol. 3 No. 4 pp. 345-357
• The Use of Shock Collars and Their Impact on the Welfare of Dogs (Blackwell, Casey) Department of Clinical Veterinary Science University of Bristol 2006

[Pam Wolf]

all things said, I am not in favor of the use of shock collars for training. However they do have a place for certain life saving cases such as persistent car chasing, chasing livestock or rattlesnake aversion training. I've seen many problems created by unskilled owners using shock collars. I would not want to see them banned in the US but I would love to see a decrease in their use.