Why Is Electrical Stimulation Better Than Vibrate?

The primary drive our dogs dispay that causes many people to seek out an e-collar for their dog is prey drive. I am only going to talk about prey drive here because it is my belief that if you are looking to manipulate defence and fight drives in dogs with an e-collar then you need to be working in partnership with a professional dog trainer. Thankfully, it is my estimate that 95% or e-collars sold in the UK are used to control dogs in prey drive.  

As most Dogtra E-Collars have 127 Levels of electrical stimulation let us imagine for illustrations sake that our dogs desire / drive to do something is on a continueum of 0-127.  

So you have your dog out walking, it is off leash and is trotting along a path, your dog is continually sampling air and if it has had the chance to chase it is smapling the air for evidence of a prey animal, that could be another dog or it could be a squirrel. So let us imagine that your dogs drive to find a prey animal at this point is at level 20. Your dog then picks up the definite scent of a squirrel and you see your dog kick up a gear and it is clearly hunting. Lets say at this point your dogs drive to find that prey animal is a level 40.  

 

Then your dog sees the squirrel! Drive goes to level 60 and your dog is in a flat out chase after the squirrel. You are probably familiar with what I have just descibed or something similar. At each of these levels all that is required to get your dogs attention is to use your collar to go slightly above the level of your dogs drive and this is why you can turn a Dogtra E-Collar from 0-127 in such minute increments, because you only need to go slightly above your dogs drive level in order to gain control. Now obviously there are things that affect this such as your dogs breed and the stubborness of it's character and this is why I always stress that each dog is treated on individual merits. 

Unlike the item pictured at the top of the page. I am not aware of an E-Collar that changes in intensity of vibration and I am not aware of a spray collar that gets smellier. If we put the fact aside for a moment that some people use vibrate to communicate with deaf dogs or as a reward marker then in terms of an e-collar VIBRATE IS VIBRATE IS VIBRATE & SMELLY SPRAY IS SMELLY SPRAY IS SMELLY SPRAY. If your dog decides to ignore or run through any of these options then you cannot just turn it up. The dog simply shrugs off the sensation and carries on trotting away, hunting or chasing. You will get some dogs that respond to vibrate but these tend to be very low drive dogs engaged in a low reward or low drive behaviour. I have even known nervoius dogs be afraid of the vibrate mode and very happy with the use of the electrical mode.