Can your dog’s e-collars make your dog Fearful and Aggressive?
Can e-collars make your Pets Un-Safe?
Electric static shock collars as advertised are too good to be true for us ordinary owners of companion dogs living in homes with their people. Maybe they can be useful to train military counter-terrorist dogs, and police-dogs for violent crime areas of US and EU cities. Or for people who live alone on large estates and rarely have visiting people who are strangers to the dogs, or unfamiliar children, and dogs never come to visit.
There are NO known technical means of preventing abuse of an electrical shock-collar (e-collar) system to injure a dog wearing an e-collar IF there might be strangers coming past, neighbors nearby, children passing by or at home, delivery people visiting the home or neighborhood dogs, cats and wild animals; in my judgment as a Professional Engineer (retired) and PH D scientist-engineer.
Theoretically a buried “wireless” electrical shock-collar system can be less expensive than a conventional fence, except for the expenses for emergency medical care for people that the dog gets trained by the e-collar to bite, the ‘dangerous-dog’ insurance, meetings with the police and so forth. None of the adverts that we surveyed warn that the buyer is likely to need dangerous dog insurance, with coverage of 2 to 10 million if the e-collar trained dog gets a child in the face.
Actual events revealed that e-collar buried wire shock collars can go wrong in many ways. Our observation showed that the most dangerous failure happens in suburbs where there are lots of children, other dogs and adults jogging or walking past. Because vendors’ suggested training can cause the dogs to fear children, other dogs, and stranger adults, the e-collars can be hazardous. When the dog is alone in the yard, innocent passers-by can try to greet the dog, tempting it into the shock zone. Often malicious adults and children find it funny to tempt an e-collared dog into the electrical shock zone of a buried wire e-fence. The dog sooner or later might “shut-down” like a taxidermist specimen to prevent being shocked with 1,000 to 7,000 volts. The dog learns that children, other animal and adults act friendly and lure him close just for the fun of seeing him get hurt (shocked). Once the electric fence plus collar has taught the dog this, the dog can suddenly impulsively without warning attack any approaching child, adult or dog, afraid that they are going to cause the collar to hurt her violently. [We suggest that anyone using buried wire shock e-collars to control their companion dog should buy dangerous dog insurance with limits of 2 to 10 million dollars. We don’t know how much insurance would be recommended for guard-dogs conditioned to be aggressive by e-collars.]
After working recently with two families, we concluded that the potential, probably risks of training an e-collared dog to be fear aggressive and dangerous to children and adults are legally and financially worse problems than the injuries that e-collars can do to the dogs.
Electric-shock collars can make puppies and many or most adult dogs fear-aggressive potentially willing to maim or otherwise harm visitors, local children, other dogs, and adults when outdoors or indoors. We had bitter expensive experience.
A dog wearing a collar that applies high voltage electrical “cattle” shocks unexpectedly to its throat is going to be anxious, fearful and very unlikely to be able to think through how to use the many different natural sense modes it has inherited. There is NO way under the known laws of Physics and biology that a Blind dog or a deaf dog is going to be able to understand and respond intelligently when its beloved people apply an incomprehensible kind of torture to its throat.
Using an electric-shock collar on a newly blind or deaf dog in our estimation will obstruct the dog’s adaptation to using its sense of smell and many sensory modes for detecting vibrations (sound) to keep track of its environment and find its way about the place safely. Recent research had documented that severe stress prevents adapting to new and challenging situations.
Randomly using the e-collar some days and not on other days forces a rational dog to expect that at any time its people will arbitrarily and capriciously, perhaps just for their amusement of visitors, hurt the dog’s throat severely. Using a conventional ordinary leash and dog collar at the same time the dog is being e-collar trained with violent static electric shocks is going to convince most dogs that with a regular collar and leash applied it can be violently shocked in the throat. Any dog trained to be continually fearful, anxious and afraid of its own people and all strangers has a potential of attempting to get rid of what it’s afraid of by attacking in fear-aggression. [Anyone who doubts the pain of such shocks might with their Doctor’s permission try on their own throat an e-collar at near full strength.]
Electric shocks, unlike smells and vibration-sounds, provide no warning to a dog that it is about to suffer severe pain and injury. The batteries don’t last very long, and they’re expensive, so even if a ‘beeper” warning is set-up pretty soon the thing is just in shock mode or stops working. A dog’s nose and its eight to ten ways of sensing vibrations in the walls, floor and ground are going to be available and working as long as and wherever the dog is alive.
Dogs can get conditioned by using the vendor recommended e-collar training regime to attack any person or other animal in the vicinity of the e-fence, or if the installation is defective even indoors. A vendor’s Web training ‘demo’ recommended overturning or undoing the dog’s socializing and bonding that should have been done by good owners and trainers from about two weeks of the puppy’s age and continuing. Effective socializing and bonding are absolutely vital to the well being of deaf, blind and blind-deaf dogs, as described on Weebly pages.
Stripping a well bonded trusting friendly dog of its trust in humans and particularly trust of its owners can make a normal dog extremely anxious, fearful and potentially catatonic-“emotionally frozen”. Such mentally and emotionally damaged dogs have been called “fear-aggressive” and known for explosively without growl-warning or body language launching a fearful defensive desperate attack on a stranger arriving, or a child or puppy behaving in an unexpected way – such as a child on a new tricycle or unexpectedly running past.
An adult female human who was bitten in the groin by an e-collared dog, who had been trained like the vendors recommended, was quite distressed. Anyone installing an e-wireless fence probably should also erect a “Dangerous Dog Warning” sign, and purchase dangerous-dog liability insurance because in some parts of the US a dog bite can result in legal-damage awards of two to 10 million dollars covering medical costs, suffering, etc.
A popular vendor’s training demo assumed that every dog is a small person, with a near-miraculous ability to overcome pain and injuries. When the vendors assured the customers that their e-collar doesn’t hurt the dogs, they are telling you that most dogs heal from those sorts of physical injuries in a few days or weeks (if not hurt again until healed), although the dogs will remember the extreme pain of 1,000 to 7,000 volts of electrostatic shock penetrating their body.
Damage to a dog’s skin can trigger onset of a necrosis, like gangrene (death), of the skin cells where the shocks penetrate. Such necrosis in addition to smelling bad and appearing to be a burn, also opens the dog to severe skin infections at the wound sites and opens a gap in the skin for the entry of certain brands of toxic (nerve-damaging) ‘tick and flea’ preventive which are available over the counter. One popular brand originating in the EU was reported by US laboratories to have only about a 15 percent safety margin between effective strength and doing damage if the dog has ‘perfect’ skin condition, i.e. doesn’t it can be unsafe to use an e-collar if you apply nerve-poison on your dogs skin.
To make the dog fear and aggressive, the vendor recommended first showing the dog the little flags and explaining to the wee moggie that each of them was a place where it was going to be severely painfully hurt. Illustrating the ineptness of telling the owner to explain the flags to the dog, they might have done better by carefully drawing a line with a teakettle of strong tea along the intended boundaries – dogs’ noses are among their most powerful and ‘educational’ senses – as you could observe at any fire-hydrant with a dog reading the pee-mail.
Next the training demo called for tossing the dog’s favorite treats and toys across the line of flags into the ‘electoral-radio-detonating mine field’. Any dog with at least two functional brain cells quickly concludes that the beloved owner is suddenly trying to kill it, or anyway inflict extreme pain-torture. [As a child I worked closely with electric-static fence controls of large animals, and experienced severe pain and injury on multiple occasions. Anyone who doubts the potential severity might if they enjoy pain (only if they are in perfect cardiac heart-health!) strap an e-collar to their own throat with the collar top-strength set and activate it, after childishly sneaking up on the experience by first trying it on their dry or glove covered hand.]
Third comes the sessions dangerous to the dog and humans by e-collar triggered fear-aggression against family and visitors. The vendors urged that the dog be near the e-fence when the visitors tossed favorite treats, perhaps such as hamburgers or ‘stolen’ toys of the dog, into the electrical ‘mine’ field. Socialized family-bonded, visitor loving puppies who were never before violently painfully injured are extremely vulnerable to such ‘distraction’ torture. The dog learns that even trusted people are dangerous (a shock is coming), especially when they are being nice and tossing things like hamburger, treats and toys.
Any dog that hasn’t been accustomed to being beaten nearly every day with a stick or whip or something else, is likely to suffer extreme emotional, neurological and mental disorientation and damage leading to fear-aggressive attacks on family and strangers, alternating with periods of “shut-down” nearly emotionless behavior and withdrawal-hiding from the people the dog was formerly bonded with. Temporarily the dog might show lowered ears, tail tucked under, other symptoms and tokens of dog-fear and its hope to evade further torture.
Finally, if the dog hasn’t managed to permanently escape yet, a vendors suggested that a dog can be permitted to ‘run-free’ in an e-fenced yard, with occasional supervision as though the dog were some five-year old human child in the yard who had been instructed to stay within the invisible dotted-line between the peculiar dog-silly important only to the humans little flags. Left for long times, or even briefly, any dogs who are strongly tempted or harassed can impulsively cross the boundary (and get shocked perhaps just once very briefly) due to excitement or some irresistible temptation outside the border. Once out, they can't return without getting shocked again unless the owners shut-off the system. This makes them afraid to come home, so you have a roaming dog after all, with animal control ‘police’ in pursuit, and money and effort totally wasted, besides likely now having a traumatized dog. Explicitly, Many dogs will learn to associate the shocks with things in the environment (such as children offering treats, strangers being friendly, passing dogs saying hello, which all lure the dog into the shock zone).
[Our deaf spotted dog in the second session concluded that the e-collar controlled in the hand of a human meant that she was going to get shocked. By the last “free-run” session, whenever the little dog saw a controller, TV remote, or camera in someone’s hand, she ran away from the premises as fast as she could go, about 35 mphr, and only returned to the fence line hours later.
A Border Collie puppy after being trained according to the vendor’s regime, was teased by the local kids with food and toys and by carrying him into the fence. A nasty neighbor tempted the puppy into the fence with sandwiches just to watch the puppy cry. A package ‘delivery’ service young man enjoyed dashing to the front door, rang the bell to excite the dog, and then run out across the “invisible” fence – while laughing as the puppy was hurt and jumped at the shocks. Eventually the dog escaped when the local power failed, and the police chased the dog for over four hours before capturing and “selling” him back to the owners – terrified and afraid of all people. He was sent to us to recover or die if a cure was impossible; after two months and over $4,000 dollars for costs of care he is still gradually getting over the damage.
Another dog, of the working breeds, was confined for three years where she could see but never work with the sheep. Eventually the dog “shut-down” and cowered fearfully in a corner because she was punished every time she tried to exercise work as needed for her breed.
Our hands-on experience as mentioned and research questions to other people seem to completely confirm the information mentioned on Wikipedia about the technically similar tasers pain-delivering that e-collars are very vulnerable to abusive misuse, and there is No known technical means of preventing it.]
It is Not funny that a vendor realized that some dogs became so fearful and withdrawn that they had to be captured, leashed, loaded into a car perhaps in the garage and chauffeured by the owner, etc, out though the high-voltage e-collar fence, much as murderers are perhaps escorted out of high-security prison gates for ‘fresh air’ parole visit to their relatives and the community (perhaps ask a former US candidate for US President how well that worked out?). And don't forget that a dog who has learned to be this frightened of the border will Not dare to come home if an earthquake - as actually happened - caused a power-outage that shut off the fence and scared the dog to run out of the yard, or somehow (tempted by a child, adult, or dog), he crosses the border and finds himself outside the yard.
A vendor claimed that European Union country bans on e-collars will cause many untrained and poorly socialized dogs owned by uninterested or inept humans to be ‘sentenced’ to die in shelters and rescues. Instead dogs trained to be fear-aggressive with e-collars are likely after injuring somebody, to die in shelters and rescues or shot by local police on-sight. Using electrical shock collars to condition-train dogs to fear and be aggressive and-or ‘trauma –shutdown’ in my opinion is unwise even for urban police dogs in the EU and the US.
For more information, please look at the Weebly pages about training, bonding, and the other guidance for owners of deaf, blind, deaf-blind dogs and ordinary dogs. Also, see the Weebly page of References, where an excellent book by Alexandra Semyonova was reviewed- despite its title, that book is unquestionably the best overview on the market, that we know of, and incorporated in excess of 100 dog-years of longitudinal (long term) research on the behavior of rescued and ordinary dogs. The most relevant parts of the book include the text box about punishment: 'What science tells us' on page 204 - 206;
a. Myths 76 and 82 tell about dogs learning to associate things in the environment with 'pain is coming';
b. Myths 85 and 86 give examples of unexpected aggression effects of punishment, 86 is specifically about learning when a nice voice and treats predict that something bad is coming.
A link to the author’s site reaches an explanation of how and why destroying trust generates aggression:
http://www.nonlineardogs.com/100MostSillyPart3.html
and
http://www.nonlineardogs.com/100MostSillyPart3-3.html
For an insight to the history, background and abuse of electric-shock control devices, please perhaps also consult the following listed Web sites. The technical origin of the dog-control electric shock collars seems to be in the agricultural use of shocks to control and contain in fields cattle weighing up to a ton in weight. Surprising to a retired Professional Engineer was learning that so-called safe-pet dog shock collars aren’t actually much weaker than the devices for hundreds to thousands of pound animals. Sudden death was reported with surprising frequency for the comparable man-portal shock so-called Taser type of anti-personnel non-kinetic police weapons; see “safety trends”. The Wiki report indicated that some organizations objected to the use taser-like devices as a form of torture, vulnerable to abuse and misuse.
Taser Safety Trends: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/583877/studies_about_taser_safety_funded_by_taser_international,_can't_be_trusted
Taser Technology Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taser downloaded 23 May 2012
Can e-collars make your Pets Un-Safe?
Electric static shock collars as advertised are too good to be true for us ordinary owners of companion dogs living in homes with their people. Maybe they can be useful to train military counter-terrorist dogs, and police-dogs for violent crime areas of US and EU cities. Or for people who live alone on large estates and rarely have visiting people who are strangers to the dogs, or unfamiliar children, and dogs never come to visit.
There are NO known technical means of preventing abuse of an electrical shock-collar (e-collar) system to injure a dog wearing an e-collar IF there might be strangers coming past, neighbors nearby, children passing by or at home, delivery people visiting the home or neighborhood dogs, cats and wild animals; in my judgment as a Professional Engineer (retired) and PH D scientist-engineer.
Theoretically a buried “wireless” electrical shock-collar system can be less expensive than a conventional fence, except for the expenses for emergency medical care for people that the dog gets trained by the e-collar to bite, the ‘dangerous-dog’ insurance, meetings with the police and so forth. None of the adverts that we surveyed warn that the buyer is likely to need dangerous dog insurance, with coverage of 2 to 10 million if the e-collar trained dog gets a child in the face.
Actual events revealed that e-collar buried wire shock collars can go wrong in many ways. Our observation showed that the most dangerous failure happens in suburbs where there are lots of children, other dogs and adults jogging or walking past. Because vendors’ suggested training can cause the dogs to fear children, other dogs, and stranger adults, the e-collars can be hazardous. When the dog is alone in the yard, innocent passers-by can try to greet the dog, tempting it into the shock zone. Often malicious adults and children find it funny to tempt an e-collared dog into the electrical shock zone of a buried wire e-fence. The dog sooner or later might “shut-down” like a taxidermist specimen to prevent being shocked with 1,000 to 7,000 volts. The dog learns that children, other animal and adults act friendly and lure him close just for the fun of seeing him get hurt (shocked). Once the electric fence plus collar has taught the dog this, the dog can suddenly impulsively without warning attack any approaching child, adult or dog, afraid that they are going to cause the collar to hurt her violently. [We suggest that anyone using buried wire shock e-collars to control their companion dog should buy dangerous dog insurance with limits of 2 to 10 million dollars. We don’t know how much insurance would be recommended for guard-dogs conditioned to be aggressive by e-collars.]
After working recently with two families, we concluded that the potential, probably risks of training an e-collared dog to be fear aggressive and dangerous to children and adults are legally and financially worse problems than the injuries that e-collars can do to the dogs.
Electric-shock collars can make puppies and many or most adult dogs fear-aggressive potentially willing to maim or otherwise harm visitors, local children, other dogs, and adults when outdoors or indoors. We had bitter expensive experience.
A dog wearing a collar that applies high voltage electrical “cattle” shocks unexpectedly to its throat is going to be anxious, fearful and very unlikely to be able to think through how to use the many different natural sense modes it has inherited. There is NO way under the known laws of Physics and biology that a Blind dog or a deaf dog is going to be able to understand and respond intelligently when its beloved people apply an incomprehensible kind of torture to its throat.
Using an electric-shock collar on a newly blind or deaf dog in our estimation will obstruct the dog’s adaptation to using its sense of smell and many sensory modes for detecting vibrations (sound) to keep track of its environment and find its way about the place safely. Recent research had documented that severe stress prevents adapting to new and challenging situations.
Randomly using the e-collar some days and not on other days forces a rational dog to expect that at any time its people will arbitrarily and capriciously, perhaps just for their amusement of visitors, hurt the dog’s throat severely. Using a conventional ordinary leash and dog collar at the same time the dog is being e-collar trained with violent static electric shocks is going to convince most dogs that with a regular collar and leash applied it can be violently shocked in the throat. Any dog trained to be continually fearful, anxious and afraid of its own people and all strangers has a potential of attempting to get rid of what it’s afraid of by attacking in fear-aggression. [Anyone who doubts the pain of such shocks might with their Doctor’s permission try on their own throat an e-collar at near full strength.]
Electric shocks, unlike smells and vibration-sounds, provide no warning to a dog that it is about to suffer severe pain and injury. The batteries don’t last very long, and they’re expensive, so even if a ‘beeper” warning is set-up pretty soon the thing is just in shock mode or stops working. A dog’s nose and its eight to ten ways of sensing vibrations in the walls, floor and ground are going to be available and working as long as and wherever the dog is alive.
Dogs can get conditioned by using the vendor recommended e-collar training regime to attack any person or other animal in the vicinity of the e-fence, or if the installation is defective even indoors. A vendor’s Web training ‘demo’ recommended overturning or undoing the dog’s socializing and bonding that should have been done by good owners and trainers from about two weeks of the puppy’s age and continuing. Effective socializing and bonding are absolutely vital to the well being of deaf, blind and blind-deaf dogs, as described on Weebly pages.
Stripping a well bonded trusting friendly dog of its trust in humans and particularly trust of its owners can make a normal dog extremely anxious, fearful and potentially catatonic-“emotionally frozen”. Such mentally and emotionally damaged dogs have been called “fear-aggressive” and known for explosively without growl-warning or body language launching a fearful defensive desperate attack on a stranger arriving, or a child or puppy behaving in an unexpected way – such as a child on a new tricycle or unexpectedly running past.
An adult female human who was bitten in the groin by an e-collared dog, who had been trained like the vendors recommended, was quite distressed. Anyone installing an e-wireless fence probably should also erect a “Dangerous Dog Warning” sign, and purchase dangerous-dog liability insurance because in some parts of the US a dog bite can result in legal-damage awards of two to 10 million dollars covering medical costs, suffering, etc.
A popular vendor’s training demo assumed that every dog is a small person, with a near-miraculous ability to overcome pain and injuries. When the vendors assured the customers that their e-collar doesn’t hurt the dogs, they are telling you that most dogs heal from those sorts of physical injuries in a few days or weeks (if not hurt again until healed), although the dogs will remember the extreme pain of 1,000 to 7,000 volts of electrostatic shock penetrating their body.
Damage to a dog’s skin can trigger onset of a necrosis, like gangrene (death), of the skin cells where the shocks penetrate. Such necrosis in addition to smelling bad and appearing to be a burn, also opens the dog to severe skin infections at the wound sites and opens a gap in the skin for the entry of certain brands of toxic (nerve-damaging) ‘tick and flea’ preventive which are available over the counter. One popular brand originating in the EU was reported by US laboratories to have only about a 15 percent safety margin between effective strength and doing damage if the dog has ‘perfect’ skin condition, i.e. doesn’t it can be unsafe to use an e-collar if you apply nerve-poison on your dogs skin.
To make the dog fear and aggressive, the vendor recommended first showing the dog the little flags and explaining to the wee moggie that each of them was a place where it was going to be severely painfully hurt. Illustrating the ineptness of telling the owner to explain the flags to the dog, they might have done better by carefully drawing a line with a teakettle of strong tea along the intended boundaries – dogs’ noses are among their most powerful and ‘educational’ senses – as you could observe at any fire-hydrant with a dog reading the pee-mail.
Next the training demo called for tossing the dog’s favorite treats and toys across the line of flags into the ‘electoral-radio-detonating mine field’. Any dog with at least two functional brain cells quickly concludes that the beloved owner is suddenly trying to kill it, or anyway inflict extreme pain-torture. [As a child I worked closely with electric-static fence controls of large animals, and experienced severe pain and injury on multiple occasions. Anyone who doubts the potential severity might if they enjoy pain (only if they are in perfect cardiac heart-health!) strap an e-collar to their own throat with the collar top-strength set and activate it, after childishly sneaking up on the experience by first trying it on their dry or glove covered hand.]
Third comes the sessions dangerous to the dog and humans by e-collar triggered fear-aggression against family and visitors. The vendors urged that the dog be near the e-fence when the visitors tossed favorite treats, perhaps such as hamburgers or ‘stolen’ toys of the dog, into the electrical ‘mine’ field. Socialized family-bonded, visitor loving puppies who were never before violently painfully injured are extremely vulnerable to such ‘distraction’ torture. The dog learns that even trusted people are dangerous (a shock is coming), especially when they are being nice and tossing things like hamburger, treats and toys.
Any dog that hasn’t been accustomed to being beaten nearly every day with a stick or whip or something else, is likely to suffer extreme emotional, neurological and mental disorientation and damage leading to fear-aggressive attacks on family and strangers, alternating with periods of “shut-down” nearly emotionless behavior and withdrawal-hiding from the people the dog was formerly bonded with. Temporarily the dog might show lowered ears, tail tucked under, other symptoms and tokens of dog-fear and its hope to evade further torture.
Finally, if the dog hasn’t managed to permanently escape yet, a vendors suggested that a dog can be permitted to ‘run-free’ in an e-fenced yard, with occasional supervision as though the dog were some five-year old human child in the yard who had been instructed to stay within the invisible dotted-line between the peculiar dog-silly important only to the humans little flags. Left for long times, or even briefly, any dogs who are strongly tempted or harassed can impulsively cross the boundary (and get shocked perhaps just once very briefly) due to excitement or some irresistible temptation outside the border. Once out, they can't return without getting shocked again unless the owners shut-off the system. This makes them afraid to come home, so you have a roaming dog after all, with animal control ‘police’ in pursuit, and money and effort totally wasted, besides likely now having a traumatized dog. Explicitly, Many dogs will learn to associate the shocks with things in the environment (such as children offering treats, strangers being friendly, passing dogs saying hello, which all lure the dog into the shock zone).
[Our deaf spotted dog in the second session concluded that the e-collar controlled in the hand of a human meant that she was going to get shocked. By the last “free-run” session, whenever the little dog saw a controller, TV remote, or camera in someone’s hand, she ran away from the premises as fast as she could go, about 35 mphr, and only returned to the fence line hours later.
A Border Collie puppy after being trained according to the vendor’s regime, was teased by the local kids with food and toys and by carrying him into the fence. A nasty neighbor tempted the puppy into the fence with sandwiches just to watch the puppy cry. A package ‘delivery’ service young man enjoyed dashing to the front door, rang the bell to excite the dog, and then run out across the “invisible” fence – while laughing as the puppy was hurt and jumped at the shocks. Eventually the dog escaped when the local power failed, and the police chased the dog for over four hours before capturing and “selling” him back to the owners – terrified and afraid of all people. He was sent to us to recover or die if a cure was impossible; after two months and over $4,000 dollars for costs of care he is still gradually getting over the damage.
Another dog, of the working breeds, was confined for three years where she could see but never work with the sheep. Eventually the dog “shut-down” and cowered fearfully in a corner because she was punished every time she tried to exercise work as needed for her breed.
Our hands-on experience as mentioned and research questions to other people seem to completely confirm the information mentioned on Wikipedia about the technically similar tasers pain-delivering that e-collars are very vulnerable to abusive misuse, and there is No known technical means of preventing it.]
It is Not funny that a vendor realized that some dogs became so fearful and withdrawn that they had to be captured, leashed, loaded into a car perhaps in the garage and chauffeured by the owner, etc, out though the high-voltage e-collar fence, much as murderers are perhaps escorted out of high-security prison gates for ‘fresh air’ parole visit to their relatives and the community (perhaps ask a former US candidate for US President how well that worked out?). And don't forget that a dog who has learned to be this frightened of the border will Not dare to come home if an earthquake - as actually happened - caused a power-outage that shut off the fence and scared the dog to run out of the yard, or somehow (tempted by a child, adult, or dog), he crosses the border and finds himself outside the yard.
A vendor claimed that European Union country bans on e-collars will cause many untrained and poorly socialized dogs owned by uninterested or inept humans to be ‘sentenced’ to die in shelters and rescues. Instead dogs trained to be fear-aggressive with e-collars are likely after injuring somebody, to die in shelters and rescues or shot by local police on-sight. Using electrical shock collars to condition-train dogs to fear and be aggressive and-or ‘trauma –shutdown’ in my opinion is unwise even for urban police dogs in the EU and the US.
For more information, please look at the Weebly pages about training, bonding, and the other guidance for owners of deaf, blind, deaf-blind dogs and ordinary dogs. Also, see the Weebly page of References, where an excellent book by Alexandra Semyonova was reviewed- despite its title, that book is unquestionably the best overview on the market, that we know of, and incorporated in excess of 100 dog-years of longitudinal (long term) research on the behavior of rescued and ordinary dogs. The most relevant parts of the book include the text box about punishment: 'What science tells us' on page 204 - 206;
a. Myths 76 and 82 tell about dogs learning to associate things in the environment with 'pain is coming';
b. Myths 85 and 86 give examples of unexpected aggression effects of punishment, 86 is specifically about learning when a nice voice and treats predict that something bad is coming.
A link to the author’s site reaches an explanation of how and why destroying trust generates aggression:
http://www.nonlineardogs.com/100MostSillyPart3.html
and
http://www.nonlineardogs.com/100MostSillyPart3-3.html
For an insight to the history, background and abuse of electric-shock control devices, please perhaps also consult the following listed Web sites. The technical origin of the dog-control electric shock collars seems to be in the agricultural use of shocks to control and contain in fields cattle weighing up to a ton in weight. Surprising to a retired Professional Engineer was learning that so-called safe-pet dog shock collars aren’t actually much weaker than the devices for hundreds to thousands of pound animals. Sudden death was reported with surprising frequency for the comparable man-portal shock so-called Taser type of anti-personnel non-kinetic police weapons; see “safety trends”. The Wiki report indicated that some organizations objected to the use taser-like devices as a form of torture, vulnerable to abuse and misuse.
Taser Safety Trends: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/583877/studies_about_taser_safety_funded_by_taser_international,_can't_be_trusted
Taser Technology Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taser downloaded 23 May 2012