CHOKE/CHECK COLLARS -
SHOULD THEY BE ALLOWED AT DOG-TRAINING CLUBS?
By Laraine Malvern

How many of us "wrinklies" remember dog training in the 1960's? Barbara Woodhouse was the doyen of the then dog-training world. She always used a choke chain and even told you to suspend a dog from the choke-chain for 10 seconds if it was mis-behaving! When I first started at a dog training club choke chains were mandatory. We walked round and round the trainer in a circle. If your dog pulled you kept jerking the chain to get it back to heel. The more your dog pulled the more you were told to keep jerking the collar. At best dogs developed a bald patch where their hair kept getting caught in the collar. At worst dogs were going round in circles with bulging eyes and blue tongues! For many of these dogs, and their owners, training classes were an extremely stressful experience. If you think about it, jerking the collar caused pain, and the dog's natural instinct would be to get away from that pain, so for many dogs a choke collar had the opposite effect to that intended - it exacerbated the problem and made the dog pull more.