Last Resort or Lifesaver? E-Collar Stories from Real Owners

Hello, dog peeps. Jack here. Just a quick one before we get into this episode. You may or may not be aware that when I'm not talking dog stuff with Max, I in fact interview people who are incarcerated in prisons across the United States on a show called One Minute Remaining Stories from the Inmates. And that show has been nominated for an award in America. And I would love your support if you've got 60 seconds to click the link in the show notes of this episode and just vote for my show. That would be amazing if you could. Thank you very much indeed. Oh, and don't forget to verify your email address. Otherwise, the vote does not count. Thank you.

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It's the Dog People Podcast with your host, Jack Lawrence. Secretly, I decided to start this podcast for some free dog training advice. You know, Malinois seem to be like the dog at the moment. Like, I think people see them on Instagram doing these incredible things. Yeah. Go, oh my God, that's awesome. And then they get one like, oh my God, what the fuck have I done? And Max O'Neill.

You would not believe how many people I meet and I go, what made you want to get, say, an Aussie Shepherd? They go, I don't know. I'd go, had you met one before? They go, no. If you want to ask me how often I walk my own dog a week, it's only twice a week.

It's the Dog People Podcast, the podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach Welcome to Dog Training So You Never Have to Shout. It's okay, it's friendly. My name's Jack Lawrence, not a dog trainer, just a dog training enthusiast. But of course, Max O'Neill, Down Under Dog Trainer, continuing on for our e-collar series that we're currently doing. And we thought we'd do some, some stories. It's story time in regards to e-collars and just some experiences. Max is gonna talk about some of his clients that he's got onto e-collars, and I'm gonna talk about my own personal journey with the e-collar and get why I chose to go on the e-collar with, with Kira.

Yeah. So I think it'd just be cool for some of you guys to hear, 'cause there might be some people listening that are a bit sort of, you know, on the fence, not sure if it's for them. So hopefully across, you know, a few of these stories that are all real stories that we can share with you guys, hopefully you find one that you relate to and go, all right, gotcha. Maybe I need to give this a go and it can help me get to where I want to go. 'Cause again, it's not this big bad tool that's meant to reduce the size of your dog's life. It's actually quite the opposite. And I think you'll probably get that from all these stories as a sort of Central theme to them all.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you want to roll with Kira first?

Yeah. So obviously, as everyone knows, I'm not a dog trainer. I got into this just purely— Kira came into my life after a dog we had passed away. She was a foster, was never supposed to be our dog, but the poor thing was the runt of her litter. And essentially she was skinny, scrawny, and no one wanted her. So she was here for, for forever to stay. The issue with that was in the early days, because she was just a foster, I had to follow the rules of the people I was looking after her for. And one of their rules, unfortunately, was the dog's not to leave the premises until such time as she's had all her shots. Had I known I was going to keep her, I would have broken that rule, but I was playing good boy and didn't, which caused me issues straight away in regards to a lot of things. And one of those things was prey drive and chasing after things. So that's how Max and I met when she was, she was initially chasing birds and that was fine. Max and I worked together. The problem with Kira was that you would teach her to stop chasing one breed of bird, as she would then go, okay, well, you haven't told me I can't chase crows, so I'm gonna chase that one.

It's like you're the fucking ornithologist going through.

Honestly, literally, I was getting to the point, I was like, mate, honestly, we cannot go around the country trying to find every breed of bird so that I teach you not to chase them. But anyway, that was what was happening. So we managed to get all under control. Bikes again as well, just push bikes, that was an issue. Got that sorted. Basically, we were hitting everything when it was coming up. And then one day we were out. In fact, I was looking after the assistance dog that came to live with me for a bit, Wombat. That's right. Because Wombat was fat. One of my jobs while Wombat was with us was to get some weight off. And the way I did that was walking. And Kira hates walking. She's like, I don't want to go for a walk. I want to go train. So, but anyway, so we were doing this massive long walk and we just finished and I was like, treat for Kira. Like, you've done this massive walk. Thank you. Let's do some off-leash time and do some training. Anyway, all of a sudden while we're doing that, we were in this area where we train all the time near a road, been there so many times before, never had an issue at all in the past. Recall's fantastic at this point, all the rest of it. But this motorbike starts revving nearby and all of a sudden I see her, the classic signs that she's about to go. I can see it straight away. Mouth closes, eyes fixate, everything. And she's just staring in the direction where this noise is coming from. And I know instantly, okay, this isn't good. Go for the recall. She doesn't respond, and I'm at a point now I'm too far away to try and get to her. And if I run towards her, not good.

Yeah.

So I then try the running away, running backwards. So see if I can get her to you know see me and and start chasing me. Not interested. Call her again, and then bang! She's gone because the bike at this point was at the lights when it was revving, and then it took off. This is she never ever ever. We've seen motorbikes before. We'd seen all sorts of traffic before, and she'd never tried to chase anything on wheels with an engine. She'd done bikes before, but never shown any interest in anything else. But for some reason this day, the motorbike, she heard it, she wanted to chase it, and she did. And she was gone, not just gone, but onto it, onto basically the main highway, chasing this bike on the wrong side of the road. She was running towards incoming traffic. Thank The Lord, for some reason at this point in time when she chose to run, there was no cars coming that way because she would have got cleaned up. Anyway, eventually, obviously the bike would have gone far enough away. I've got Wombat with me who is an assistance dog. I can't obviously leave the assistance dog. Anyway, obviously it was fine. She came back and I had to like, good girl, that's a good girl for coming back. And then, and then that's when I went, right. I have to get her on an e-collar because I literally at that point was like, I don't know now what she's going to chase.

Yeah.

Because, you know, everyone talks about, oh, well, you know, you're obviously just not— your recall's not good enough. Your training's not good enough. If you can't do it without an e-collar, your training is not good enough and your recall's not good enough. I hate— I mean, just infuriates me so much.

If you've got a dog with that much drive, is at some stage there'll be something else that comes up trumps to you. And it'll be the thing that's the closest to the real deal for them. And for her, she's like, hey, yeah, you can move and make noise, but not as much as that bike.

This is a dog that chased an aeroplane. I took her to train once near the airport. There's a little off-leash dog area right where the planes come in to land. And a plane came over the top of us and she saw it and just bolted after it. I'm like, mate, what are you doing? So this is a dog with an intense prey drive.

Yeah.

So anyways, I was like, okay, she's got— we got to get her on the Ecolab because even when I said that, I at the time, because I still wasn't that educated on the e-collar. This was before, obviously, we even— I think we even started this podcast. Yeah, it actually definitely was before we started the podcast. I still very much at that point felt like a failure. I thought, I've got to do this and it's because I'm shit at training my dog.

Yeah.

And I was like, you know what, whatever, it is what it is. I'd rather my dog be alive and me just feel a bit like a shit trainer than her be dead and whatnot and me being sorry for not using the tool. So anyway.

Isn't it crazy that— sorry, just to pause there. Isn't it crazy how some people have that where you go, okay, Okay. Option A, life or death for my dog, could literally get killed running down a road. Option B, my dog gets a bit of a tickle on the neck and people go, nah, I'm going to go option A.

Well, this is the thing, because I, my biggest thing was like, I was, I was, although I felt a bit like I was a failure, I also was okay with that. But what I was worried about was how other people would react to that. Because shock collar is such a stigma. with a shock collar, that anytime you would tell anyone, I'm going to put her on an e-collar. I mean, for instance, I told my mum. Mum's old school. I told my mum, she loves animals, loves all animals. She won't even kill a spider, you know, always has to put it outside. She will not hurt a single animal. She loves them, and dogs especially. And she loves Kira. Like, you know, Kira's almost like another grandchild. And so when I said to her what happened and what I'm going to do, she was like really just trying to talk me out of it. You're going to ruin that dog. You're going to ruin the relationship with her. She's going to be terrified. All of the stigma that surrounds Yeah. 'Cause her response to me was maybe she's just gonna unfortunately have to be one of those dogs that has to remain on the lead.

Yeah. Like it's a, like it's a thing.

And I'm like, no, like how bad is that? What, she's never gonna be allowed to be off lead unless, unless I'm in a situation where I know for sure that she's not gonna run? And how do I know that for sure? What, unless I go to a dog park with a fence and then maybe she'll get in a fight with a dog because, you know, that's what happens in dog parks. Like, no, this is not the life I want for me. It's not the life I want for the, for my dog. Yep. Because I had her on the long line for a long, long time. In fact, she was on a long line for about a year before I was confident that her recall was at a point where I'm like, you can come off that long line. And even on that long line, I had an incident where, actually it was during the period where just before I made that decision to taking this back, after that happened, before I went definitely on the e-collar, I thought I'm going to do our training that we've done with other birds and stuff with her, with the motorbikes.

Yep.

Put her on the long line so I had control, all the rest of it. We were out, you know, doing some training. Out of nowhere, a bus drove past, right? Nothing again she'd ever focused on, was not worried about. And she decided, I'm going to bolt after the bus now. So she was gone, but she's on the long line and I'm like, right, I have one end of the long line. She's on the other end of the long line and she's now running at full pace towards that bus. What happened?

Yeah.

She hit the end of that line and she flipped.

Yeah.

Like somersaulted.

Yeah.

Thankfully didn't hurt herself, but could have really hurt herself.

Yeah. And that's it. It's like, that's, that's the interesting thing with e-collars, right? Is I know people love all the, you know, like the long lines are a great training tool, sure. But for me, they're never a long-term thing because, you know, on top of the obvious rope burn that you can get to yourself is if your dog gets a fucking wind up on a 5 or 10 meter long lead is They could break their bloody neck doing that.

And she's so lucky she didn't. She literally somersaulted like twice.

Yeah, she hit it that hard at the end. Yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy. Whereas the e-collar, like, the interesting thing is, although they can really feel it, in terms of actual real damage that you could do, there's really not a lot. It just puts them in a lot of discomfort, but there's not an actual physical, tangible, you know, thing that's happening to them or impact, if that makes sense.

Totally.

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Then after that incident, that's when I was like, right, e-collar has to happen. I did. So I obviously spoke to you about it. I then went on YouTube and I just consumed like e-collar stuff like it was going out of fashion. Like I just watched every video I could, made the decision, got the Mini Educator, started training her on it. Got it all sorted, got her on there, did some motorbike stuff, corrected her on it, stopped her. Essentially, it worked a dream. And Mum came to visit. I had the e-collar and she goes, "Are you going to put that thing on her?" I said, "Yes, I'm going to put that thing on her. Let's go for a walk." So we went for a walk, and she was really good because she was in one of those moods. Sometimes she's just super spicy, and just like she's just like darting around and anything. And Mum was watching her, and she's panicking so much. Like she's like, "Oh, Jack! Oh, I'm like." It's fine. Relax. Then motorbike thankfully came past. She saw it, went to go, and I went, ah, tapped it, and then she came running back to me.

Yeah.

And mum goes, you know what? I get it.

Yeah.

I get it. I completely get it. She saw that Kira didn't yelp. She wasn't scared. If anything, as soon as she got the tap, she was excited because I had done the training where the tap meant good things are coming.

Yeah.

Don't chase that. Come to me. You get your ball. We'll play tug. You get to chase it. All the rest of it. So she came sprinting back. She's at my feet. She's looking up like pants. She's ready, ready. Let's go. Let's go. Good girl. Through the ball. Boom! And she was gone. And and I was like, see, there's no pain involved in it. You know, it's she's not yelping. She's not scared. Her relationship with me has not broken down. She still loves me to death. She follows me everywhere we go. She still drives me nuts. You know, all over me. And now what I have is a dog that does not need to be forever in her life on a long line.

Yep.

And she has the freedom now. Like, I can, I know I can take her anywhere, pop that on her. And I don't even, as I said, I don't even have to use it now anymore. She sees a motorbike or anything she wants to chase. She looks at it, looks at me. As soon as she looks at me, she gets her, you know, the cue. Yes. And she'll come back, chase the ball, whatever it is. And now, as we've spoken about so many times, it's purely for us. It's a seatbelt. Yeah. You know, people have to use it for different reasons. I know there's certain trainers that will use it still in training just to get the dog sort of a bit more sort of reactive and as in not reactive, but amped up and doing things. I don't need it for that and I don't use it for that. I have got it there constantly around my neck and it took me so long as well to not feel guilty.

You tuck the collar in your shirt.

Oh, mate, I would hide it because it's like, When I'm out training her, you know, we're doing bits and pieces and I always, it's really nice. We get a lot of comments about, you know, how well-trained she is and all the rest of it. Oh, that's so great. And part of me was like, I don't want people to see the e-collar because they'll think, oh, that dog's only doing it because he's zapping her.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I would hide it. And then, you know, eventually I'm like, what am I doing? Like, if I'm not comfortable with people seeing me, you know, with this around my neck, then I shouldn't probably be using it. Yeah. Like, I'm just like, you know what? Fuck you. Yeah. This is keeping my dog safe. I don't have to justify it to you. Like, it's here for a reason. If people ask me, I tell them. Like, I was, I was out one day and a guy said to me, oh, what's that you've got there? And I was almost about to say what I used to say. It's a GPS system.

Yeah. And this is my walkie-talkie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just makes a beeping noise. But I was like, no. I was like, it's an e-collar. He goes, oh, it's one of those shock collars. I said, I said, it's a bit of an old school term for it. They're not shock collars anymore in the old sense, what they used to be with the one level of a whack. I said, you know, it's, it's the technology's come a long, long way. I said, but you know, it's purely a safety measure. And I even said to him, like, I'll show you what happens when I tap it. And I've done this recently on Instagram, is actually showing people videos about how Kira responds to the e-collar because, you know, I think that the thing you've got to dispel so quickly is It's not hurting her.

Yeah, exactly.

She's not in pain. She's not wincing. She's not crying. She's not cowering. She's not coming back to me all timid, like, oh, I'm really sorry. When I tap it, she's flying back. You know, when I correct her, I showed a correction on our Instagram the other day. I said, look, because we were out with my mother-in-law's dog and I was throwing a ball and getting Kira to stay in a down because she's bigger than this other dog. And so giving that dog a chance to catch the ball. So I put her in a down, throw the ball, and she was And then she was breaking the down a couple of times. So I was like, I'll show you what I— what a correction is for Kira when she breaks her down.

Yeah,

did it. You barely even see anything. Like, I'm like, blink and you'll miss it.

And we did that. We did a video like that on the Instagram. We were like, all right, see if you can spot the moment where each of these dogs during play is corrected on the e-collar.

Yeah.

And we had people watch it 3 times to go, I got no clue. And then we either had someone DM or comment going, hey mate, I think you've, you've cut the video a bit short. There's nothing in here. Oh no, no. Both dogs were corrected twice.

Everyone's

just expecting

this massive reaction. Like this backflip.

It's like, no, this is just a, hey, cut it out. Yep. Done. Boom.

Yeah. And that's it. So, so that's why I got into the e-collar and look, I'm probably very much like a lot of people who listen. I wasn't so much anti it. I just personally at the time before I knew more and before I educated myself, I saw it as a failure. I saw it as me going on an e-collar means I can't train my dog And her recall, I'm just not good enough at what I do. And that's what a lot of people who are against e-collars say. That is what they push. They push the rhetoric that anyone who uses an e-collar is just lazy and is not good at training dogs and they're not using the correct way.

Couldn't be further from it.

I don't argue with people on the internet anymore. It's pointless because you're never going to change anyone's opinion, especially when they're so staunch in one particular direction. But the amount of times you see online people talking about e-collars and just attacking people who use them There are far better ways. And then you look at their Instagram and see the dogs that they're training. You're working with frickin'—

Your border collie in the backyard with no other distractions.

Nothing on your page suggests you've got any dog that you've worked with that's high drive to any sort of intensity when it comes to things like prey drive. Like, you know, it's just not there.

That's it. We need to change the rhetoric that the e-collar isn't a last resort. Like, it can feel so extreme for some people that, like, when I've And I've suggested it to people before, and they might only have a, you know, 7-kilo Jack Russell, and they go, geez, that seems so extreme. You know, he's not this pit bull that's killing everyone. I'm like, no, no, no, that's, that's not what it's for.

No, Jack Russell is mental. It's definitely for a Jack Russell.

Yeah. In the same way that we go, like, you know, if you have your bullmastiff who's 70 kilos on like a slip lead or a chain, you'd go, oh, that's not, that's not dumb. That's just a sensible thing. That's not a fail. You just, you've just picked the appropriate tool for your dog. A lot of dogs, they need that tool. Like, reason being is like, you know, people always ask me, oh, could we— will we eventually not need this tool? Whether it's a, you know, like let's say we're using a slip lead or it's an e-collar, people go, is there a world where we eventually don't need this tool? And the answer is always the same. It's like, potentially, but it can go one of two ways, okay? The tool can apply a penalty that your dog will 99% of the time go just choose to avoid instead of actually copying it. Let's say if tomorrow, if the government went, you know what, we're no longer doing speeding tickets. We don't believe in them. We're just going to trust you. Half the population would still drive at 110 because it's the right thing to do. The other half of the population, I'd go, see ya, I'm going to be in Brisbane in 20 minutes. And I'd speed. And dogs are the same. Some dogs don't need it. Some dogs you can let off the lead and go, hey, I've got zero accountability measures. You can run off and go wherever you want. And they'll still choose to do the right thing. Other dogs will go, I'm going to go chase a motorbike down the road. And That's it. It's just, you know, some dogs, if that's the way they're wired, they are, you know, social opportunists by class, then that's, that's it. It's mean. And again, that kind of the— I guess with Kira's story, the way to like wrap that up is we look at how much bigger her life has gotten. It wasn't like we stuck that thing on her and went, we're going to stop you from doing everything that you love and we're just going to zap you. It's the opposite. It's, hey, we're going to give you a medium-level stim, and that means you can do all the things you love, but we can just close the doors on a couple of things you're not allowed to. And now she can go to the park, chase the ball, Use her herding ball. She can go here, go there, and her world is infinitely bigger. And when you made that decision to e-collar train, it's crazy to think the other path you could have gone down of just stick her in the backyard, chuck a bark collar on her, and just ignore her for the rest of her life. And she's not an off-lead dog. And that's the way it goes for so many. It's crazy.

Well, and that's the thing. I mean, because there's places I can go where I know she won't be able to chase a motorbike because, you know, she's nowhere near one. But that's not practical because some mornings I wake up and I'm like, right, we've literally got half an hour. Yeah. Before I need to be in the office doing X, Y, Z, I— let's just— we go over the road to where there are no fences, but there is a road and we do our training and we do all the rest of it. And again, I know that we're safe. If it was a case where, well, I can't do that with you, so all I can do is now put you on a lead this morning and we're just going to walk around the block.

Yeah.

She'd come home, probably destroy something.

Yeah.

You know, wine or whatever thing, you know, whatnot. And she wouldn't get what she gets, which is, you know, fulfillment.

And management inevitably fails. Like, you know, you could go to the park and for 364 days a year, there might not be a motorbike, but you know, e-bikes everywhere. You go there one time and then it's there and then you go, fuck, like, yeah, you're screwed. Yeah.

So hopefully if anything you got out of this, it's that it's, you're not a bad person if you go for an e-collar. In fact, completely the opposite. You're someone who obviously wants their dog to have a more fulfilling life and be able to go many places and whatnot. And all I would say is please don't listen to people who are, you know, yes, there are people that use this tool incorrectly. We know that, but that's the same with every single Yeah. But I just would hope that people don't listen to these people who go off on tangents about how anyone who uses an e-collar is just a bad person.

Send them these episodes instead of you arguing them. Let us do the argument for it. We've presented some pretty solid facts that I think are pretty hard to argue against. So

yeah. All right. Any questions, as always, the Dog People Podcast on Facebook or Instagram. The Dog People Podcast is a mashup of Pumpkin Production, hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill. Edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence.

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