Tag: shock collars

I live in the USA and shock collars have always bothered me. I see them fairly often on dogs in Petco. I had to dogsit a family pet and was handed the remote to his shock collar to, in their words, keep him calm. He was a puppy and the reason he had it was because “he jumps and pulls on the leash”. Puppies… do that??

drferox:

Where shock collars are freely available there seems to be this persistent belief that if you can just be tough/fierce/scary/strong/alpha enough then the animal will ‘submit’ and have perfect behavior. This isn’t the case, and it’s super confusing for an animal to be surrounded by strong ‘DONT DO THAT’ messages without any positive ‘Do This’ messages, it can only guess at what you want.

Sometimes they stop trying and they exhibit learned helplessness, where they essentially do nothing because they don’t understand how to void the punishment. In a human this might look like depression, but people might mistake this behavior as being ‘a good/obedient dog’ instead. This is because the animal stopped showing the behaviour the human didn’t like, but it is not a good state for the dog to be in.