Dog collars that shock, spray and beep to control barking

Dogs bark. [SOUND] And run and do this. And all of that can sometimes be out of hand. So that's why they make these. A huge array of electronic dog collars that use different stimuli to modify your dogs behavior. Let's see how they do it, and if it's a good idea. [MUSIC] Now, these are often called bark collars or shock collars, based on their most common technology. However, they span a wide array of behaviors they target, and stimuli they use to modify those. Let's start with the first one that's best known. [MUSIC] Electric Shock or as it's known today get more market friendly verbiage static, lots of volts but miniscule lamps, that's why these things don't kill or injure your dog. Now the electrical shock or static collar uses a couple of electric probes here like you see there. They're metal, they make contact with the dog's skin. they have to get through fur to do that. In fact, the manuals for these go to some great length to show you how to get these in there to make contact with skin. Then they pass electrical current, AC by the way, between the two through conductive skin tissue, that's the mechanism of it. Now many of these, the level of electricity, this pass between these two electrodes can be very The problem is you can't ask your dog What does that feel like? So you're doing kind of a random adjustment. It can either be done in the collar or sometimes on a remote like this, which brings us to how these are activated. Some of these are activated by barking, the sound and vibration of it. Others also let you do a manual trigger here with that big [UNKNOWN] orange button that says, zap my dog now. And many of them will operate in both modes. [MUSIC] Now, whatever kind of static or shock collar you get as far as I can tell there are no regulations about what they put out. This is a bit of a wild west. [MUSIC] I've got an ability to set the power on this one. I'm going to start here down at five that's on a scale of zero to 99. Put my fingers across the electrodes, and let's see what happens. I don't feel a thing. Let's kick it up to 15 again it's on a scale of 99 at the top end. Okay, got that uncomfortable. Let's try 35. [MUSIC] Is my last YouTube video? Damn it no, not fun. I won't go beyond that, to be honest. Call me a wimp, but that's very uncomfortable. 99 seems egregious. But this is what these will do in terms of feel. Everyone is gonna feel it differently, not to mention every animal. So let's get some science behind this. If I put our standard voltage tester here that you might use around the house across this Picking it up there at 35 on the range, but that doesn't quantify it either. So what I'm going to do is hook this thing up to a multimedia. We've got our fluke meter here I've got it set to AC voltage, we just take and put our probes across the terminals here on the dog collar Interestingly even if I rank it up to 99 I was still getting about 90 volts at least on this product. Another caller operated by an app tap out at 45 volts at it's highest setting. And another one triggered by approximater transmitter you place in your home. Only delivered about 20 volts in our testing. [MUSIC] The vibrating callers use a vibration motors similar to the one that makes your phone buzz, so we all know what that's like. [MUSIC] Then there are spray or scent collars typically using citronella although sometimes, just water Now this one's a real crowd pleaser. It does a lot of things including tone, vibration, but also if you push this button right here, watch what happens, it sprays a scent. There's a little tiny citronella cartridge in there. I hate citronella And since this calorie mounted about like so below the dog's throat and aiming forward, that cloud is citronella goes right forward and right back into their face and in their nose. And that all sounds like kind of a quaint, nice way to modify a dog's behavior. [MUSIC] Sound training colors emit a beeper, a tone that is also in the human hearing range or sometimes ultrasonic sounds that we can't hear. Now you may have noticed a lot of these colors do multiple stimuli, sound and scent and vibration and shock. So, you need to [UNKNOWN] up even if you're going to use this technology. One collar may do it all. These along with a whole resonance in pet tracking technology have definitely brought us to what has to be the golden era of wearable pet tech. But is it a good idea For that, I went to marine humane, just north of San Francisco. I volunteered here and now they have a renowned behavior and training department headed by Don Coville, Come on guys. Come on. Okay, prominent. The simple and stupid question here from someone like me is why do dogs bark? Well, dogs bark because they're trying to tell you something. They're either excited, they're happy, they're sad. They're lonely. So they're trying to communicate. First of all you want to figure out why is my dog barking, right? It could be lack of mental stimulation, lack of physical stimulation, and your dog might be lonely social isolation is a huge problem for dogs. Your dog might be concerned, maybe you've left your dog out in the backyard all by himself and he's like, wow, this is a lot of stuff to deal with. So there's a lot of reasons for dogs to bark, and it's important for you to understand why they're barking before you just try and suppress the behavior. Now when you take one of these devices and use it on your dog, We have no way of knowing what it feels like for them, right? I mean, we can certainly put it on ourselves and shock yourself and say, Wow, that's unpleasant. But you really don't know what it feels like to a dog because they're built differently. And even these ones that you sent, which I guess were considered a less harsh alternative to the shock collars or what they call now static colors, right We don't really know how a dog senses citronella?. Right, I mean, a dog's olfactory system is so much more sophisticated than ours, it could possibly be more punitive than a static or shock collar. As you say, we just don't really know. When you use one of these get an animal to stop doing something. What's the downside of that? If it works, it looks like it works to a lot of people. Right. Well, what we really want to do when we're trying to fix the behavior is what is the behavior that we don't like. And then what we try and do is replace it with an alternative behavior that we do like. So instead of going straight to punishment, we want to look at the underlying cause of the behavior and see if we can train a different behavior that would eliminate The other behavior so for instance, jumping up, you have a start, I don't like my dog jumping up, you instead of punishing the jumping up you say well what would be okay instead, and a really nice alternative is teaching your dog to sit when they greet people as opposed to jumping up, so then you don't even have to go to punishment. That scenario. We talked about jumping up. Sure. But barking is the one that everyone- Sure. Just go. They lose their patience, really fast. Well, the first step is to get a little bit of a history about what's going on with the dog. When does it happen? How does it happen? What does it look like, when it happens? What triggers it? And then, we see if we can sort of break that down. If this triggers your dog's barking, let's see if we can get rid of the trigger, for instance. Or, if your dog is- That's different than For some of the bark collars, if you have a multi dog household, the bark of a different dog can trigger the shock for the dog that you want to try and suppress the barking. And that's really unfair to the dog, you know, because you really need to pair the negative stimulus with the behavior that's happening. So if they're getting shocked for behavior that they're not even doing. Well, that can make a dog crazy. I'm curious about products, so I try and test them out to see if they are something that we wanna recommend to our clients. So I did test out the citronella bark collar on a [UNKNOWN] I had who was kind of a sport barker. [LAUGH] Meaning he would go outside, he'd look around, he'd just start doing some random barking. Now why was he doing the barking? I call it sport barking but I had eliminated lack of mental stimulation, lack of physical stimulation all of those things. So from my point of view he really didn't have any reason to bark. Just barking for fun. Let's call it that. So I tried the citronella collar and after a couple of barks and a couple of sessions he's I can't A negative stimulus. You're kinda squeezing the balloon in one place. It's bubbling up somewhere else perhaps. Right, you're suppressing behavior as opposed to addressing the cause of the behavior. [SOUND] [BLANK_AUDIO] Here! [BLANK_AUDIO] Good boy! [NOISE] Hurdle! [BLANK_AUDIO] Forward! Strike.