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May 17, 2011

I was wondering if you had any immediate thoughts on martingale flat collars. Are these effective and humane?

Full Question:

Hello!

I've gotten so much out of your site and the Basic Dog Obedience DVD. It has helped me so much with my 18 month old rescue Weimaraner. I also got a hold of "Don Sullivan's Perfect Dog" (theperfectdog.com) and while I appreciate the plastic 'kinder gentler' prong collar that comes with this, I found his training advice to be less helpful than what I learned from your DVDs. In particular was his emphasis on never using treats. Joe and I have been working on retrieving work and have been experiencing particular difficulty getting him to reliably "drop." Don's advice on this was to pop the dog on the underside of the mouth. This was absolutely ineffective with Joe. So then I went back to the marker training and the treat bag and it took all of 5 rounds and he got it just fine.

I had a collar question, I was wondering if you had any immediate thoughts on martingale flat collars. On the equipment section of your Basic Dog Obedience, you don't mention these. Are these effective and humane?

Thank you.
Reuben

Cindy's Answer:

In our opinion, a martingale collar is really nothing more than a flat collar that the dog can't slip. You see a lot of these on sight hounds, because of their unique structure of having a head smaller than their neck.

They can get out of regular collars very easily.

I use a variety of collars on my dogs, flat collar, prong collar and remote.

I don't feel that there is one PERFECT collar out there, they each are used as needed according to the dog's drive, temperament and level of training.

I hope this helps.

Cindy

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