I have been wondering why there is such a difference between the use of prong in US and Europe. It seems from this board and others that the use off a prong in the US is widespread whereas in Europe the choke is more in use and in the UK and in scandinavia the E-collar is totaly banned.
Due to the fat that we're holding the opening trail for this season in a few weeks time many handlers from other clubs come to train with us to get their young dogs accustommed with our field/decoy. I notissed here that the use off aids/trainingmethodes differs from club to club and not so much from dog to dog e.g. every dog from club x is trained with devise Z . Am i right if i state that the use of a trainingmethode/devise is more culturaly determant than dog determant? Meaning; trainers stay in thier confortzone and don't necessary use the best trainingmethode/devise for the dog.

Greetings

Johan

This is my personal take on the subject:

I think it's cultural differences, every part of the world seems to have their own little way of doing things and their own beliefs that are based on what a few people think to be right, then passed on from generation to generation and spread around by word of mouth, now all people know is the way they were told by whoever taught them to train dogs. Then Mr Internet came along and messed it all up, showing people who cared about improving their training methods better ways to do things. Unfortunately not everyone is open minded enough to accept that a prong is just a more humane healthier way to correct a dog. Alot of trainers have told me "you shouldn't need to use a prong unless the dog doesn't respond to a choker"... I would skip the choker n just go to a prong from day 1, because I was able to go online, talk to people with a different perspective and get training information from someone other than my local trainer. But if I didn't have the internet, and I just knew a few trainers in my local area that all had the same opinion on dog training, guess what? I wouldn't know any better. That's exactly how regional training methods develop. Find a small town in Europe where people have their own little club, their own way of doing things, people might have the internet but don't really care about reading up on dog training because they already know how to successfully train their dogs - voila, you have a club that uses a choker, and anyone that comes into that club in the future will be taught to use a choker. Not everyone in the US uses prong collars, only the more educated people <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Chokers are still widely used by an annoyingly large amount of inexperienced people that don't know how to use it correctly.

This board gives somewhat a false impression of the general US mentality toward training for the average people. Most people on this board are very well read on the Leerburg philosophies and those are the training methods most people on this board abide by, so someone inexperienced or someone from a different country could read this board and get a very false impression of the general way Americans train dogs. There's many many people people out there training dogs with chokers, there's people out there training dogs by beating the heck outta them till they bite. A friend of mine offered me training advice when I first got my dog, I obviously never listened to it, but it was the ol' "if your dog digs a hole, fill it up with water n stick his head in it for 5 seconds" thing, or "if your dog poops in the house rub his nose in it" type "training". This person could go out, get a dog, never even care about improving or researching her training methods and just stick her dogs nose in his poop to potty train the dog. Not everyone cares about reading 100 articles and studying a training philosophy, both in the US and Europe. That's how people get stuck in their own way of doing things.

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A lot of trainers have told me "you shouldn't need to use a prong unless the dog doesn't respond to a choker"...

That's some logic, eh? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />