The Use and Limitations of Bark Collars: A Comprehensive Approach to Managing Canine Behavior

One of the most popular tools used by dog owners to manage unwanted behavior is the bark collar. These devices use various methods, such as citronella spray or static shock, to deter dogs from barking excessively. However, before we dive into the world of bark collars, it's essential to understand that our canine companions are individuals with unique personalities and needs.

When using a bark collar on your dog, you may assume that you're addressing the behavior directly. However, this assumption can be misleading. We don't truly know what it feels like for dogs when we use these devices. Dogs are built differently than humans, and their senses are more complex. Even devices that use scent, which are considered a less harsh alternative to shock collars or static collars, can be problematic.

The problem with bark collars is that they often focus on the symptom rather than the underlying cause of the behavior. Instead of addressing the root of the issue, these devices may simply suppress the unwanted behavior without teaching an alternative behavior. For example, if your dog is jumping up to greet people, instead of punishing the jumping up, you should teach a more desirable behavior, such as sitting calmly when greeting visitors.

When working with dogs, it's essential to consider their emotional well-being and relationship dynamics. Punishment can degrade the bond between dog and owner, making the dog fearful or anxious. On the other hand, positive reinforcement techniques can strengthen the relationship and encourage desired behaviors. By understanding the underlying causes of undesirable behavior, you can develop a more effective approach to managing your dog's behavior.

In situations where dogs bark excessively, it's essential to gather information about the triggers and patterns of their barking. What time of day does it occur? Is there a specific situation or stimulus that sets them off? By understanding these dynamics, you can begin to address the root cause of the problem rather than simply suppressing the behavior.

One common concern with bark collars is their use in automatic modes while owners are away. This can lead to unintended consequences, such as shocking dogs for behaviors they're not even exhibiting. In multi-dog households, this can be particularly problematic, as the bark of one dog may trigger the shock for another. It's essential to consider these potential issues when choosing a bark collar and to use them responsibly.

In my own experience with testing out bark collars, I've seen firsthand the limitations and potential drawbacks of these devices. When using a citronella bark collar on a Malinois who was prone to sport barking – simply barking for fun – I noticed that it suppressed the behavior but also created an obsessive-compulsive disorder-like behavior in the dog. The dog would spin around outside, fixated on barking, rather than engaging in other activities. This experience taught me that while bark collars may work temporarily, they're not always the most effective or desirable solution for managing canine behavior.

Ultimately, before using a bark collar or any other tool to manage your dog's behavior, it's essential to take a step back and consider the underlying reasons for their behavior. By understanding these complexities and addressing the root causes of undesirable behaviors, you can develop a more effective and compassionate approach to training your dog.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: endogs bark 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 dog's behavior let's see how they do it and if it's a good idea 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 electric shock or as it's known today in more market friendly verbage static lots of volts but miniscule amps 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 lengths 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 on many of these the level of electricity that is passed 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 ol orange button that says zap my dog now and many of them will operate in both modes 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 I've got an ability to set the power on this one I'm gonna start here down at five that's on a scale of 0 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 is this my last youtube video ah 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's gonna feel it differently not to mention every animals 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 it's picking it up there at 35 on the range but that doesn't quantify it either so what I'm gonna do is hook this thing up to a multimeter we've got our felucca 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 all right now again I'm set to 35 right now and let's put this into a recording mode so we see our peak reset that cleared and here we go what did we get if i metered this right the collar is delivering about 90 volts when set to 35 that's considered high voltage though clearly the amps are low interestingly even if I rack it up to 99 I was still getting about 90 volts at least on this product another caller operated by an app topped out at 45 volts at its highest setting and another one triggered by a proximity transmitter you place in your home only deliver at about 20 volts in our testing the vibrating collars use a vibration motor similar to the one that makes your phone buzz so we all know what that's like 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 collar be mounted about like so below the dog's throat and aiming forward that cloud of 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 but remember to them that's probably like a wall of stink because according to Florida State researchers anyway dogs at between 10,000 and 100,000 times the scent acuity that we have so take that smell of citronella and really multiply it this is why dogs are able to sniff out cancer with high accuracy while our dumb noses miss garlic half the time sound training collars emit a beeper a tone that is also in the human hearing range are sometimes ultrasonic sounds that we can't hear now that you may have noticed a lot of these callers do multiple stimuli sound and scent and vibration and shock so you don't need to stack them up even if you're going to use this technology one caller may do it all these along with a whole renaissance 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've volunteered here and know they have a renowned behavior in training department headed by Don Koval Promenade the simple the 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 you know 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 shop 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 the even these ones that use scent which I guess are were considered a less harsh alternative to the shock collars or what they call now static collars right we don't really know how a dog senses citronella right I mean a dog zola factory system is so much more sophisticated than ours it could possibly be more punitive than a static or shock collar you know as you say we just don't really know when you use one of these you get an animal to stop doing something what's the downside of that if it works it looks like it works too a lot of people right well what we really want to do when we're trying to fix a behavior is we said 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 stalk 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 when punishment can degrade your relationship with your dog you can it can make your dog afraid of you as opposed to wanting to do the things that you want them to do so you've got barking what do you do to do divert that I guess that's scenario we talked about jumping up but working 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 dogs barking let's see if we can get rid of the trigger for instance or if your dog that's different then hitting it with one of these stimuli is cut at all right right we can use these manually when you're present but then there are times when you set these thing on automatic and you go away all right you have concerns about these automatic modes that are triggered by behavior by barking right the problem is you the dog is wearing these when you're not home so you really don't know what's happening 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 you know that can make it up crazy you know I'm curious about products so I try and test them out to see if they you know are something that we want to recommend to our clients so I did test out the citronella bark collar on a Malinois I had who was kind of a sport barker 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 you know mental stimulation lack of mental stimulation lack of physical stimulation all of those things so you know from my point of view you really didn't have any reason to bark just barking for fun let's call it that so I tried the citronella collar and you know after a couple barks in a couple of sessions he's like oh I can't I can't bark so it did suppress the barking but what I noticed is that it started him spinning he it created an OCD behavior of him just going outside and thinking about barking and instead spinning and that was really disturbing it was it was more disturbing than I even thought it would be so of course I discontinued that experiment yeah interesting so sometimes when you use something like this a negative stimulus you're kind of squeezing the balloon one place is bubbling up somewhere else perhaps right you're suppressing behavior as opposed to addressing the cause of the behavior bottom line is before you try to stop a behavior with your pet by pushing a button on an app or on some kind of remote control you got to dig into why it's happening these are complex creatures they have reasons for what they do you got to understand that first the collar comes later if at all rightdogs bark 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 dog's behavior let's see how they do it and if it's a good idea 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 electric shock or as it's known today in more market friendly verbage static lots of volts but miniscule amps 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 lengths 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 on many of these the level of electricity that is passed 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 ol orange button that says zap my dog now and many of them will operate in both modes 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 I've got an ability to set the power on this one I'm gonna start here down at five that's on a scale of 0 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 is this my last youtube video ah 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's gonna feel it differently not to mention every animals 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 it's picking it up there at 35 on the range but that doesn't quantify it either so what I'm gonna do is hook this thing up to a multimeter we've got our felucca 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 all right now again I'm set to 35 right now and let's put this into a recording mode so we see our peak reset that cleared and here we go what did we get if i metered this right the collar is delivering about 90 volts when set to 35 that's considered high voltage though clearly the amps are low interestingly even if I rack it up to 99 I was still getting about 90 volts at least on this product another caller operated by an app topped out at 45 volts at its highest setting and another one triggered by a proximity transmitter you place in your home only deliver at about 20 volts in our testing the vibrating collars use a vibration motor similar to the one that makes your phone buzz so we all know what that's like 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 collar be mounted about like so below the dog's throat and aiming forward that cloud of 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 but remember to them that's probably like a wall of stink because according to Florida State researchers anyway dogs at between 10,000 and 100,000 times the scent acuity that we have so take that smell of citronella and really multiply it this is why dogs are able to sniff out cancer with high accuracy while our dumb noses miss garlic half the time sound training collars emit a beeper a tone that is also in the human hearing range are sometimes ultrasonic sounds that we can't hear now that you may have noticed a lot of these callers do multiple stimuli sound and scent and vibration and shock so you don't need to stack them up even if you're going to use this technology one caller may do it all these along with a whole renaissance 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've volunteered here and know they have a renowned behavior in training department headed by Don Koval Promenade the simple the 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 you know 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 shop 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 the even these ones that use scent which I guess are were considered a less harsh alternative to the shock collars or what they call now static collars right we don't really know how a dog senses citronella right I mean a dog zola factory system is so much more sophisticated than ours it could possibly be more punitive than a static or shock collar you know as you say we just don't really know when you use one of these you get an animal to stop doing something what's the downside of that if it works it looks like it works too a lot of people right well what we really want to do when we're trying to fix a behavior is we said 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 stalk 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 when punishment can degrade your relationship with your dog you can it can make your dog afraid of you as opposed to wanting to do the things that you want them to do so you've got barking what do you do to do divert that I guess that's scenario we talked about jumping up but working 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 dogs barking let's see if we can get rid of the trigger for instance or if your dog that's different then hitting it with one of these stimuli is cut at all right right we can use these manually when you're present but then there are times when you set these thing on automatic and you go away all right you have concerns about these automatic modes that are triggered by behavior by barking right the problem is you the dog is wearing these when you're not home so you really don't know what's happening 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 you know that can make it up crazy you know I'm curious about products so I try and test them out to see if they you know are something that we want to recommend to our clients so I did test out the citronella bark collar on a Malinois I had who was kind of a sport barker 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 you know mental stimulation lack of mental stimulation lack of physical stimulation all of those things so you know from my point of view you really didn't have any reason to bark just barking for fun let's call it that so I tried the citronella collar and you know after a couple barks in a couple of sessions he's like oh I can't I can't bark so it did suppress the barking but what I noticed is that it started him spinning he it created an OCD behavior of him just going outside and thinking about barking and instead spinning and that was really disturbing it was it was more disturbing than I even thought it would be so of course I discontinued that experiment yeah interesting so sometimes when you use something like this a negative stimulus you're kind of squeezing the balloon one place is bubbling up somewhere else perhaps right you're suppressing behavior as opposed to addressing the cause of the behavior bottom line is before you try to stop a behavior with your pet by pushing a button on an app or on some kind of remote control you got to dig into why it's happening these are complex creatures they have reasons for what they do you got to understand that first the collar comes later if at all right\n"