Stop Using These 3 Tools on Your Reactive Dog

Here's why the prong collar is a much more ethical tool than any other collar you would think about putting on your dog. When you look at a prong collar, you think medieval torture device. It's cliché. I know it's been said probably a million times at this point. You've seen the pictures online, the ones that claim to be prong collar injuries. And this one, that's just propaganda. It's not a prong collar injury at all. It's actually one of those spiked leather collars that's been turned out and the dog has grown into it. Anyway, I digress. Today I'm going to explain why the prong collar is actually a more ethical choice than most popular tools you're told to use. I'm going to throw in a big caveat and a bit of a curveball at the end of the video. So make sure you stick around so I can get that point across, please. Before we do that, though, there's a concept you need to understand. A dog will happily put himself through acute discomfort to attain acute pleasure, and that can happen over a sustained period of time without your dog even knowing. So that means a dog will pull through a tool for a sustained period of time, and that pressure will compound until it's exceptionally uncomfortable to the dog or even worse. Actually harms the dog because the goal is more valuable than the discomfort. And this is key to understand. So let's look at the traditional flat collar. A dog will happily pull into it because it's not uncomfortable enough to deter the pulling in the moment, and it's just comfortable enough to pull into for an entire walk, maybe an entire hour. What your dog doesn't realize, but you should, is that the pressure against their trachea for an hour every single day is going to damage their throat. And I know what you're thinking. You can just teach a dog to stop pulling with food if you stop every time they pull on the lead. If you're watching this video, you've probably tried that. And we both know it didn't work no matter how consistent you were. The other problem, especially with reactivity, is that the flat collar compresses your dog's airway. This limits their breathing, which in turn increases their heart rate, which in turn skyrockets their arousal. It's like a feedback loop. The tool itself is making the likelihood likelihood of a reaction higher, but also the reaction itself even worse. And it's, for me, the worst tool you could possibly use to try and train and help a reactive dog. So next comes up the harness. This always gets thrown into the argument, and I know people are already typing in the comments, what about the harness? I'm getting to it. People say harnesses were made for sled dogs to pull, and even someone that doesn't really use harnesses, I think, is a bit of a straw man argument. The real issue is it actually makes the dog hyper- comfort to pull more. And if your dog is already pulling on the walk, they're in gear 3 when they maybe should be in gear 1, and they are closer to a reaction before a trigger is even present at all. And when the time comes to redirect their energy, because that's all reactivity training is, is just ultimately like energy economics. Don't send the energy that way, send it over here instead. Again, there's loads of videos on our channel for you to understand that concept. The harness makes it almost impossible to redirect that energy. The fixed point sits so low on the dog's back that you have no leverage to change their perspective. You can't steer them. I would never walk an untrained dog, a reactive dog, on a harness. A trained dog on a long line, maybe, but a dog that can't regulate itself, I just wouldn't. While you're here, guys, uh, in case you didn't know, we have a free program, free community, free resources. I appreciate how difficult it can be trying to put all the puzzle pieces together from different YouTube videos. So we've actually done that for you in a comprehensive free course. It's called the Behaviour Bible. And we even go live in there once a week to answer all your questions. The whole intention behind it is to give you free value. Then should you want to pay us to help you continue your journey and speed up the process of solving your dog's reactivity, then that option's there too. So yeah, if you want that, the link's in the description. Other than that, enjoy the rest of the video, and I'll either see you in the next video or I'll see you in the Behaviour Bible live. This brings us to the head halter, or the haltee, a favorite on Facebook groups everywhere. And again, I'm not a particular fan. It has the propensity to make a dog feel more defensive because you've essentially restricted their number one self-defense mechanism, their head and their mouth. And you see dogs simmering in a semi-state of defense when they've got these things wrapped around their face. And beyond that, it's extremely aversive. You put a head halter on a dog and they will scratch at their own eyeballs just to get it off. And a tool that immediately needs that level of counter-conditioning is not a nice tool. It just looks nicer than the prong. And I've seen dogs with lasting scars on their face from their own dewclaws trying to get the fucking thing off. But its biggest downfall is what I call the bounce-back effect. The halter works by suppressing your dog's arousal, like, continuously throughout the walk. And the you take it off, that arousal shoots back up. If your goal is to get your dog off leash, and I believe it should be, don't hold your breath. The moment the halti is gone, your dog is gone. Okay, and now the prong collar. And I know you're thinking I'm just biased, and I'm actually going to explain at the end of this video why you might not want to use the prong collar either. Unlike a halti, a prong collar can be placed on a dog and have zero impact on that dog's psychological state, even if that dog has never had one on before. It's not immediately aversive. It works like power steering, not by inflicting pain. The main benefit of the prong collar, it allows you to change your dog's perspective with actually the least amount of pressure of all the above tools, and it allows you to best redirect your dog's energy when you need it the most. However, and this is my caveat, they do have the propensity to go wrong. They can become what we call an agitation tool if they are not conditioned correctly. And by conditioning, I don't mean adding lead pressure and then giving the dog food. That's not what I mean. I don't think that's good conditioning at all. I think that's for a different video. I mean conditioning the dog to understand what the pressure means. To understand that when they feel the discomfort, because that is how it works, but so do all the others. You just don't realize it because they don't look uncomfortable. Conditioning means that when the dog feels the discomfort, they need to understand the desired outcome, which for most of the time is change their perspective and just look somewhere else, ideally towards less. And again, this is where I have to put the disclaimer, because the internet is full of fucking morons. With any tool, you should seek professional help from a trainer with a lot of proof of concept, not a social media influencer. I know that is somewhat cliché coming from me, but I also have a lot of proof of concept, whether you like it or not. So listen, that's my opinion on tools. I'm sure there will be some people in the comments up in arms about this, but I'm not going to sit here and virtue signal. I'm just here to give an unfiltered opinion and try and do right by dogs. And hopefully the right information is going out to the right audience and will be used with care and maybe even help other trainers explain these concepts to their own clients. If you've liked this video and you trust YouTube's very sophisticated algorithm, I'm sure you'll enjoy this one too. And if you haven't yet subscribed, we're so close to that 100,000 subscriber mark. So if you want to hit that button, hit that little bell, I believe. I would quite like my silver play button. So anyway, I'll see you in the next one.