I have been a professional dog trainer for forty years now. One thing that I have seen come along and get very popular is the spike collar (pinch collar). Thirty years ago we tried to get these collars outlawed and off the market on the grounds they we cruel and usual punishment for a dog. Today people want fast results from training, so they use the spike collars. People want their do dog to to act instantly on a command. Well anyone of us would act instantly if I had a lot of steel poking us in the neck. Pinch collars do hurt an animal. I have seen other so called professional handlers using these colors. In my book there is nothing professional about them by wanting to hurt a dog to obey. I took a two year old Rottweiler who use to pull huge logs around the yard. With one half hour a day of training for about six months he entered his first obedience trail. He went on to get his CD (companion dog title) and is the best house pet any one could want.

I did all this with a nylon choke collar. Repetition is the key to good do training. You have your undivided attention on the dog for thirty minutes or (longer for some dogs) a day. That time should be spent on bonding with the dog, whether its with me or the owner. As you are teaching him verbal commands put hand signals with the commands. When you finish teaching him the basics he will respond to the hand signals and you will have a pet who follows hand signals from across a room without using verbal commands. I do that now with my Dobermans.

I have found that retraining a dog from the spike collars to the choke collars is tough. They do not follow commands at first. They feel free to miss behave because they are not being forced to act with pain. I have retrained many of these dogs. Many do equate following commands with pain. People today would rather hurt a dog than to take their time and train the dog with love and compassion. I have two, one year old Doberman Pinchers that I train every day. They are happy and want to please me. I do not feed them treats I feed them PRAISE. They love it and I do not have to hurt them to follow commands. I would like to here others opinion on the pinch collars. I hope there are a lot of other people who feel the way I do. My final though is I would like to take the pinch collar off the animal and put it on its owners neck and see how they liked it. See how many commands the owner would follow for me, If this was done pinch collars would not be used by anyone.