TriTronics

THE TEN REQUIREMENTS – Part VIII by John Wick

E-collar Fit is Crucial for Success

How is proper tightness determined?  Well I’ve been using these pronged collars for many years and talked and written on this subject hundreds of times but still haven’t found the exact right words to explain it.  I guess the bottom line on it would be just one notch tighter than snug will usually do the job quite nicely and not be overly offensive or strangling to your dog.  But snug means lots of things to lots of folks.  For some people, it means loosely tight or much looser than tight; while to others it means fitting firmly but not tightly.  Shoot!  It’s about impossible to accurately explain.  I could show you if you were here with me, and we had a dog to help me out.

Proper fit boils down to the fact that we need the points making semi-firm contact with the dog’s skin.  Not just their hair!  But we don’t want the points unduly pushing or punching inward and upward tighter than necessary to make adequate contact.  To accomplish that does NOT require that the entire collar be tight on the dog’s neck.  Just needs to be snug enough that the points make adequate contact so that our dogs always receive the intended message the instant it’s needed and delivered.

Proper tightness is best achieved by putting the E-collar directly behind the dog’s ears where the neck is the smallest.  This way whether the dog is carrying his head up or down and smelling the ground, the collar can’t move back and forth or flop around and get out of position or lose contact with the skin.   It often does that if the E-collar is stationed behind the dog’s regular collar and then she lowers her head allowing the E-collar to move downward and forward thus losing skin contact.  TRI-TRONICS knows how crucial precise fitting is to successful use of all their pronged collars.  That’s why their collar straps have lots of close and extra holes in them.  Every knowledgeable and successful trainer I know strongly recommends always using the TRI-TRONICS’ collar straps because a regular collar doesn’t have enough holes in it.  Those extra holes make it much simpler to get just the right slightly tighter than snug fit every time on every dog.  Almost every time I fit every dog, I still usually go back and forth a couple of times between a couple of adjacent holes before settling on just the right one.  Often there are two holes that seem about right and in that case, I usually back off to the bigger one while always making sure contact with the tip of the points and folds of skin cannot be lost.  If that’s lost, everything is lost!

Hair length varies greatly on dogs of different breeds and even between dogs of the same breed.  It’s not just hair length that matters; it’s hair thickness too.  Some dogs seem to have 500 hairs per square inch and others appear to have 5,000.  That is certainly a major factor to consider when determining how to achieve that slightly tighter than snug fit, which assures constant point and skin contact.  This is also why TRI-TRONICS offers short and longer contact points for their pronged collars.

I always use the shortest points if they’ll do the job.  Sometimes on some long or heavy haired dogs we need to switch them up to the longer ones.  Or we need to take a hair trimmer and give that throat area on the dog a little trim to shorten the hair to ensure proper contact is being made.

If you’re using the longer contact points and your dog is not a long and thick coated rascal (why would you?), be darn sure not to draw that collar up too tight or the contact points will be excessively and uncomfortably poking your pal.  You don’t want that, no matter what kind of dog owns you!

I’ll see you here next month to share more thoughts.

John Wick

Tags: e-collar, fitting your e-collar, John Wick, tri-tronics