I have a 5 1/2 month old treeing feist and he's just about at the end of the period where he gets acclimated to the electric collar.

I got him at 8 weeks and have been following mostly Leerburg methods from the beginning, though I utilize marker/clicker training a bit more than you see in the Basic Obedience DVD, for instance. So far, obedience training has been going excellently and he's a happy dog with stable nerves.

In any case, I plan to use the e-collar to improve off leash obedience outdoors and around the house. I have a Dogtra IQ collar which was designed for smaller dogs. It has 100 stimulation levels, a continuous, nick, and vibrate function.

I've watched the Leerburg DVD on ecollar training and notice that Ed never used the vibrate function on any of the dogs.

I've been trying to think of what, if anything I should use it for. I've thought of using the vibrate as a "recall" button by vibrating the collar, then verbally recalling him to me until he links the vibration to a recall command. Since he's a hunting dog, he'll be spending a lot of time with me in the woods out of sight. I do have a pretty loud voice that I can project when I want to, though.

I'm not entirely sold on the usefulness of training him to recall upon vibration, so I'm willing to hear other ideas.

Thanks.