11/07/2025
If you've trained multiple dogs using the exact same system successfully and that includes your electric collar protocol, it's time for you to step back and now dive into the nuance of optimizing your training and electric protocol for individual dogs and move away from the one exact system works for every dog.
Yeah, it works but it's probably not really optimized for individual dogs.
I guess you have to look at your goal, to be successful or really try to figure out what is best for individual dogs.
And by best I mean what is fair, humane, compassionate and effective, not just what works.
What works is frequently a blunt instrument and what's best is a scalpel.
Sadly, many many people are just happy with that blunt instrument and don't seem to have the intellectual curiosity or desire to figure out how to use a scalpel.
Without getting into an entire dissertation here, this is a list of some of the things I take into account when I'm determining what I think is optimal for a dog, the transition to, it's understanding of and then reinforcement activation with a goal of creating new habits and changing behavior with an electric collar.
What brand of electric collar, they all seem to deliver the sensation during activation somewhat differently and different dogs may sometimes respond positively or negatively to different sensation activation.
I currently have and will experiment with 2 different 15-year-old Tri Tronics collars that still work just fine. Three different Garmin, two Dogtra, a Sport dog and a couple different Educators.
Feel them for yourself, the activation sensation from a Dogtra feels nothing like that from an Educator to me and I don't think it does to the dogs either. Some dogs clearly work better with some colors than others.
Straps. Back when Tri Tronics was the only game in town all the straps were wide and then more recently many many manufacturers have gone to the 1/2"strap. Honestly I think they save two cents on every unit and the only dogs that I care to use half inch straps on are dogs like huskies/shepherds because that narrow strap tends to settle through their heavy coats much better allowing proper contact. All other dogs I use the wider strap even on my Garmin collar which I have modified to use a wider strap.
Why?
Straps need to be tighter than most people think to get good CONSISTENT contact so the sensation the dog receives is entirely predictable based on the intensity you have selected. Of course that intensity is based on the dogs individual sensitivity to sensation and it's sensitivity in various stages of arousal which generally is greatly reduced.
I find wider strap allows that proper adjustment dissipating the pressure from the collar strap over a wider area of the dogs neck.
Contact point length?
Generally I use longer contact points even on short coat dogs because it allows me to keep the strap a hole or two looser and still get consistent contact.
I've had a couple dogs over the years that were so incredibly sensitive to sensation I grow down the contact points on a Garmin receiver and then cover them with a piece of cloth athletic tape turning intensity level one into probably intensity level 1/2 which was appropriate for this hyper sensitive dog.
Strap tightness beyond consistent contact.
Sometimes if I'm seeing a little bit more of a response or a little bit less of a response than I want just tightening or loosening the strap one hole can have a positive effect.
Receiver position.
Depending on the dog, some dogs are more or less sensitive in different positions on their neck. A dog with a lot of flesh may respond better to a collar position on the side of the dogs neck and some dogs are more physically sensitive with the receiver in that position.
Additionally, hunting dogs pushing through cover can run into a situation where those obstacles are moving the receiver forward and back, that can sometimes lead to a little bit of road rash where the contact points have moved back-and-forth throughout the day. With dogs like that I might run the collar on the right side of the neck one day, the bottom of the neck the other and the other side of the neck the third day helping to avoid any potential abrasion.
Believe it or not there's a lot of information on the Internet that says an electric collar has caused a burn on my dog's neck and I've read where both researchers and veterinarians have assumed this.
Loudly, for the people in the back. Electric collars cannot burn your dog's neck and that has been proven unequivocally in court cases.
What people are undoubtedly seeing is an overly tight collar left on too long. A collar worn too frequently and too loosely and abrasion and some dogs have an allergic reaction to the nickel in the contact points which is why accessory brass contact points exist .
AN ELECTRIC COLLAR CANNOT BURN YOUR DOG REGARDLESS OF INTENSITY OR DURATION !
Off the top of my head and using talk to text, those are the first things to come to mind when I think about optimizing how I use an electric collar.
As far as the different methods that I may use to transition the dog to understanding the collar as contextual reinforcement of understood commands?
I better make another post about that because it certainly isn't just a single method I follow that I learned elsewhere.😉
