Technology helps collar many pups’ aggressive habits

I’m not big on technology. Give me the old ways, tried and true. But occasionally an innovation is so effective, even an old Luddite falls for it.

So it is with electronic dog collars.

Six months ago I was among the pack of dog lovers condemning these gadgets as cruel and unusual. Then I got an unruly pup with a problem that wouldn’t go away.

Nellie, now nine months old, is a full-blooded black Labrador that can jump as high as your nose, and will, any chance she gets. Dog folks say it’s a natural trait, the origins lying in the fact that wolves fed their young in part by regurgitating digested food. The wolf pup that got to momma’s mouth first got the meat. The instinct lingers.

Nellie is a happy, well-adjusted creature whose way of saying hello to friend or foe is to leap up and give them a lick. This, oddly enough, is not everyone’s cup of tea. By the time she was three months old, neighbors and friends were running for cover. One elderly woman muttered, “That dog is going to kill me.”

I took Nellie to weekly sessions of the Canine Training Association in Davidsonville, Md., where dogs and handlers learn to behave, American Kennel Club style. The only advice they had about jumping was to knee the pup in the chest or grab her front paws and run her backward, which dogs hate. Problem was, she was smart enough not to jump on me. How do you train other people to react that way? You obviously can’t.

It wasn’t till we went pheasant hunting with Jim Farmer, a lawyer from Waldorf, Md., that an answer emerged. Farmer, a veteran dog man, got the full Nellie greeting, as did his wife and son. As I packed to leave, he sent son James inside to fetch something. The young man came out with a black plastic box, inside of which was one of Farmer’s spare electronic collars. He’d heard all my arguments against them. “Just try it,” he said.

The results have been, well, shocking. In a month, with just a nudge now and then from the magic collar, Nellie went from a wild-card liability that couldn’t be trusted off leash to a well-behaved companion who stops when you say “Whoa,” comes when you call, sits and stays and hardly ever jumps on anyone, though you can tell from her body language she’d like to.

All this came at no evident expense to her personality. She’s bright and cheerful as ever; she just isn’t knocking little old ladies over.

The age-old problem with dog training is timing. A dog’s memory span is a nanosecond. If it takes more than a moment to correct a mistake, the dog has forgotten it and is on to the next thing. If they bite grandma on the ankle, then sit down to think about it, by the time you wag your finger and yell at them they think you’re scolding them for sitting.

But if you can make the correction instantaneously, the message gets through. That’s the beauty of an electronic collar.

Like any tool, it can be misused. I got my distaste for “shock collars,” as I used to call them, from seeing dog owners use them as instruments of torture. They wouldn’t strap one on until they went hunting, then use it to try to stop the dog from chasing a missed bird or running deer. The further away the dog got, the higher they’d crank the power till the dog shrieked in pain.

The instructions are plain about that. The control wand has power settings and you’re not supposed to go high enough to make the dog cry out. Nellie regards a “correction” as an annoyance. It reaffirms her obligation to respond to an instruction. If I say “come!” and she stares at me uncomprehendingly, a gentle jolt sets her in motion and the showdown is over. The key is to use it sparingly, every day.

My other complaint about training with a collar was that dogs sometimes turned into automatons, their personalities overwhelmed by technology. They don’t just come when called, they sprint in terror, then hunker at their master’s feet. In my newly reeducated opinion, that’s a problem that lies with the trainer, not his tools. So far, Nellie shows no sign of that and I can’t imagine she ever will.

So in a few months, I’ve gone from vigorous opponent of electronic collars to vigorous proponent, which just goes to show that you can, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks.

Next step: Electronic dog fence!