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Happy New Year

© Lesli Richardson

A new year means a lot of things, but what usually gets the most attention are the resolutions that are (for the most part) forgotten even before most of the New Year's hangovers are healed. Resolutions to lose weight, resolutions to exercise more, resolutions to do (or not do) a bunch of things.

I think for the new year mine is going to be to approach things with a more open mind. (Warning: lame columnist segue!) I am a pretty open-minded person, but there are some things that I usually don't budge on. One of them being I believe in training methods that are as humane as possible. Pinch/prong collars have never been a part of my training arsenal, even though I realize that there is a time and place for their use IF they are in competent hands and are used as a last resort. I however, would "proudly" claim that I never had to use one.

I've talked about our adventures with Bubbles (formerly Bubba, our bulldog girl). In the past few months there has been little improvement. She is HIGHLY food motivated - so much so that if you present a treat to her she can't focus on what you want her to do and she tries to get the food away from you. She responded initially to clicker training, but lost her focus so fast there was little progress. A head collar is out of the question for her because she is a bulldog, and with her facial configuration, we simply cannot use one on her.

And she broke a heavy-duty training collar.

Yep, snapped the ring right off the end of that sucker. I'm talking one of the big beefy types of "chokers." Not to mention all she did on it was pull, pull, pull and choke, choke, choke.

This left me with two options - a prong collar or an electronic training collar, neither one "great" choices in my mind. In fact, when I first brought her home from the shelter one of the techs there almost gleefully offered a prong collar to me and I rebuffed the offer almost in horror. A prong collar? On one of MY dogs? Never! But I have never had a dog that was as resistant to training as Bubbles. There have been other dogs I've fostered and worked with who were stubborn, but I was always able to get marked improvement from them with the usual methods of click and treat, positive reinforcement, etc.

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