Unless you simply want to know what collar or harness will do the least damage to your untrained dog as she pulls you down the street, you can’t talk about the ‘best’ dog collars and harnesses without talking about training.
It would be akin to asking which are the ‘best” shoes. Are we going for a ten mile hike? Am I standing on my feet for hours? Am I Cinderella at the ball?
Today my own footwear is suitable for kicking ass and taking names.
Improperly used collars, blind prejudice in favour of a certain type of harness or muzzle restraint and uninformed shocked horror at the thought of certain other kinds of collars are some of my hot button issues.
Harnesses, chokers, collars of any kind basically serve one main purpose. To restrain your dog. Yes, you can also attach licences, identification and rabies tags to them. You can get them in reflective colours so that they make your dog safer at night. You might want to buy one that looks pretty or cool. But mainly, we use them to control our dogs.
No matter what kind you prefer, the chances are pretty good that the device is not going to contribute to your dog’s comfort. At best, he or she may just find it mildly uncomfortable, the way you would feel if you had to wear a tie or a scarf around your neck, twenty-four hours a day. At worst they can actually do damage to your dog if they are used incorrectly.
And boy, howdy, I would be willing to bet good money that at least half, and maybe more, of people who use a collar or harness of any kind, use it incorrectly. I have no idea why something as simple as a dog collar should defeat so many people. You’d think they were being asked to install a child’s car seat correctly. Or send a rocket to the moon. Those are things seem to be of about equal difficulty as far as I can tell.
So here’s a thought. Why don’t we train, not restrain?
Let me be clear. I think it’s a good idea to have your dog constantly wear some sort of a flat collar as long as it is loose enough not to cause the dog discomfort. The standard rule is that you should be able to get two fingers between the collar and the dog’s neck. If it’s leaving a permanently flattened ring of fur against the skin, it’s too tight. If it’s leaving a mark on the skin, get it off right now! What are you, an idiot?? A too-tight collar, in addition to being uncomfortable or even painful, can result in damage to the skin, infections where moisture accumulates when the collar gets wet, or abrasions and sores. Which can get infected.
Having a collar on a dog means you can put the essential dog tag and some form of readily visible ID on your dog.
A microchip is a great idea, but if your dog gets past your open door when the mailman comes, or jumps the fence when the fireworks start, is running loose and someone manages to corral her, they will have to hang on to her until they can get somewhere that the chip can be read. If it is an evening, weekend or holiday the Good Samaritan will have to be willing to keep your dog until the vet (or the shelter) opens.
Not everyone will or can take a strange dog into their house. There may be other animals in their house that they are concerned about from the point of view of health or safety, or family members may have allergies. So yes, by all means, put on a loose collar with the dog’s name, your name and a phone number and/or address. The rabies tag is also a must-have on a collar. A scared dog who has run away may bite their rescuer. Knowing that the dog has an up to date rabies shot will relieve one big concern about being bitten.
But if – let’s call it a house collar – is comfortable enough for your dog to wear constantly, it will not function well as a way to control your dog. Flat collars can be a convenient place to hook a finger through if you want to keep your dog from running out the door. But if it is loose enough to be comfortable, chances are pretty good that a strong, determined dog who, for example sees a squirrel across the street, will be able to back their head out of it and take off before you can grab him.
Harnesses can also work as a sort of house collar.
The truth is, the harder we try to restrain a dog, the harder they will try to escape or pull against the restraint. That creates a greater chance that the device we’re using will hurt the dog, even if it’s only to teach her bad habits. Find a collar suitable for training your dog within the parameters of a training method that will work with your dog. Then find a suitably comfortable collar for everyday wear.
So do I have a recommendation for the ‘best’ collar, or as between collars, head restraints (like Haltis and Promise collars) and harnesses?
No, although I do have some observations which I have set out below.
A collar (other than the house collar) is a tool, plain and simple. Which collar is best for your dog will depend on the dog’s size, strength and personality. Mostly it will depend on the type of training you are giving your dog.
My very strong recommendation is to teach yourself the best method for training your dog to walk calmly on a loose leash, and to sit (or lie down) and stay – reliably. Because the harsh truth is that there are only two ways to end up with a dog who won’t pull on the leash or run out the door after a squirrel.
One is to get an indolent breed who won’t give a damn about any damn squirrel in creation and who doesn’t want a walk anyway. These are typically the very small lap dogs, or the giants, who are just too big to want to exert themselves muchly.
The other is to undertake the very time consuming and often frustrating task of creating a well trained dog by making yourself into a well-trained, dedicated, and consistent owner.
Part of your training arsenal will be a collar or harness. Which one you choose will depend on how you want to train and what kind of dog you re training. Here are some observations about various types of collars and harnesses.
Harnesses: We’ll start with harnesses, because I agree with Cesar Milan, who said “The harness can be a great tool if you want your dog to pull you”. There’s a reason sled dogs wear harnesses and not halters or collars. Cesar suggests you could use a harness if, for example you were on roller skates or even a bicycle and wanted your dog to pull you along. Safety risks be damned.
Any contraption that is good for having your dog pull you is self-evidently bad for training. Harnesses, in my opinion, have no benefits as a training device, despite the dozens of people who arrived at the pet resort, telling me they had they dogs on harnesses because it “helped with the pulling” – as the dog pulled them in the door. Self-delusion is a powerful thing.
Harnesses can easily teach your dog to pull, because there is little downside for him in doing it. The harness distributes his weight over his entire body, and thereby makes it comfortable for him to pull. Don’t opt for a harness because you’re too lazy to teach your dog to walk on a loose leash.
One article I saw online said, ” [The harness] is used only as a device to keep the dog safe, like a seat belt, rather than as a training tool.” The article then goes on to discuss the various ways dogs can be injured by the use of “no pull harnesses”.
The title of this article was, I kid you not, “Why Flat Harnesses are Best for Training Dogs.”
There are things called “tightening harnesses’, like Easy Walk harness and Thunderleash. They ‘work’ by the strap around the abdomen pulling tight (and upwards) when the dog pulls. This can cause pain. You are simply substituting the pinch on the neck a slip or choke collar creates for a pain in the chest or abdomen. And it is more difficult to make the quick ‘tighten and release’ correction with the wide band of the abdomen strap.
There are a lot of claims that having a harness with the clip at the front is the perfect, non-harmful solution to teach a dog to heel. Full disclosure – I have not tried to train a dog with this device. But I have seen lots of people being towed along with this device, the dog to twisting his body towards the handler at an unnatural angle, from the shoulder.
There is some evidence that suggests use of this kind of harness will, over time, damage the underlying skeletal structure.
Having said that, there are dogs who not only can be, but absolutely benefit from being walked on harnesses. The list is short:
(a) brachycephalic dogs, or other dogs with breathing difficulty
and (b) dogs with fragile necks.
We once had the fun of boarding three Prague Ratters, two of whom came to us when puppies. They were about the size of a teacup. I was always paranoid that I would step on one and crush it like a ripe plum. Even if you could have found a collar tiny enough to circle the little necks, the bones in their spinal column were about the diameter of a safety pin. One tiny jerk on the neck could have spelled death. The (padded) harness was the answer.
Aside from teaching your dog it’s fun to pull, there are other drawbacks to harnesses for fit and healthy dogs.
Some are difficult to put on.
One man arrived to pick up his dog (who we had been walking on a slip collar) and fumbled for fully five minutes with the harness he had brought before asking me if I could get it to work. It took me another five minutes to reverse engineer the sucker and another two or three to try to get the dog to stand still while I lifted up each leg in turn and put it through some sort of loop affair that then had to be fastened to the main part to the harness with a clip.
Fit is important both for comfort and security. Many one reviewers of various types of harnesses complain about the difficulty of getting correct fit.
Dogs can escape harnesses more easily than a slip collar (Link to Tempy). The more complicated and difficult to put on, the more that risk increases, because people do it wrong. If you must walk your dog on a harness, add a collar and fasten the clip from your lead to both harness and collar. A bit of an insurance policy if the dog gets out of the harness.
Flat collars: Excellent as house collars, provided you don’t fasten them too tightly. A common mistake is to forget, when you get a dog as a puppy, that her neck grows along with the rest of her. Understandably, no one wants to buy any more collars than they have to, but don’t let it get too tight before you move up to the next size.
Flat collars are useless for training.
They are also useless for walking, unless your dog is already extremely well trained not to pull, or is too indolent to be bothered. How many times do we see people walking a dog wearing a flat collar, who is pulling madly at the end of the lead, towing the protesting owner along behind?
The dog will be choking and gasping because the owner has buckled the collar as tightly as possible in a futile effort to persuade the dog not to pull. It is mildly astonishing to watch how much punishment a dog will take and still not desist from pulling as hard as he can. It is even more astonishing that the owner seems to be oblivious, persisting in the belief, all evidence to the contrary, that somehow the combination of the dog’s inability to breath and their wimpy admonitions to Rover to “Stohhhhhp? Rover? Stop pulling?” will eventually produce a well mannered, calm dog.
Alternatively, the dog will be in imminent danger of pulling its head back through the collar and escaping, because the collar is loose. If an interesting enough incentive presents itself, the dog will back out of the collar and be gone.
Look at the gap. Good for the dog’s comfort. Not good if the dog decides to take off and wriggles his head through.
Flat collars are for use only when the dog needn’t be under control.
If you do use a flat collar as a house collar, consider getting one with a breakaway feature for added safety. The collar will pop open if it gets caught on anything, from the corner of a crate or cage to another dog. It is sadly true that some dogs have died when their collars got caught on something and in trying to escape, they twisted and turned and pulled in such a way that their collar strangled them.
Martingale collar: This looks like a flat collar, but rather than just one buckle, there are two, with an extra short loop. This makes it like a combination of a flat collar and a choke collar. When the lead is attached to the second loop, it will tighten up a couple of inches at the front if a correction is given, or the dog pulls. These collars very widely used for dogs with thin necks, like whippets and greyhounds.
They are often wider than typical flat collars, which reduces the stress on the neck. They are gentler than a choke collar, but still allow you to correct the dog.
Head halter: These restraints, such as the Halti and the Promise ‘collar’ became popular when first introduced, largely I believe because of successful marketing campaigns that promoted them as a humane alternative to choke collars. One such is even called “Gentle Leader”. What’s not to love?
The irony is that they are used by many for ‘positive-only’ training, when really, they are aversive – the worst thing you can say about any training device in the positive only world.
When the trainer I was working with to try to get my beloved Toby to listen to a word I said I said suggested a prong collar, I was horrified by the sight of it. [ Link to Training my own dogs] It looked like it belonged in a chamber of horrors. She smiled slightly and said,
“People hate prong collars, but when used correctly, certain dogs don’t mind them at all. People love Haltis, because they look gentle, but dogs hate them.”
No, the head halters do not choke the dog. Yay!! What do they do instead? Well, here’s a direct quotation from the training manual of one such device:
“The Gentle Leader® dissuades your dog from pulling on the lead by transferring the pressure of his efforts to the back of his neck via the neckstrap, while the pressure of the noseloop communicates your reassuring control. Your dog’s instinctive resistance to these redirected pressures causes him to stop pulling to relieve the pressure at the back of the head and to relax and walk easily by your side.”
Did this make you cringe a little? It did me.
Just how is it better for pressure to be taken off the entire circumference of the neck and transferred to just the back of the neck? And let’s not forget the nose. The pressure of that nose loop causes the dog’s head to torque around. Anyone seeing a dog put into this device has seen this. Dogs fight it. They have to be conditioned to accept it, because the design to makes them feel dominated.
The whole system is set up to make the dog stop pulling because to do so hurts his nose and his neck. How is that Positive? And what happens if he doesn’t stop pulling? What if he sees a squirrel, forgets that pulling will cause pain, and rushes out to the end of the leash, only to have his nose and head snapped around at high speed.
Don’t get me wrong – head halters will work as a means to inhibit your dog from pulling. But how they do it is frankly not all that humane and is certainly not a uniformly positive experience of your dog. Just don’t fool yourself that as training devices they fall into the ‘positive’ school of dog training, and in that respect alone are far superior to choke collars. They are going to be less acceptable to many dogs than a slip or choke collar, properly used. And there is a risk of injury.
As with pretty much any of these devices,the effectiveness goes up and the risk of injury goes down, in direct proportion to how knowledgeable and skilled the handler is in using the device.
Choke or slip collars: These come in both chain link and nylon varieties. The chain link is more indestructible, but for training purposes, I don’t think one is more powerful than another. There are some disadvantages to chain link. It gets hot on a hot day. A link can also get caught on the dog’s tooth and break it.
There are a lot of people out there who would like to see these kinds of collars disappear altogether. I get why. Using them wrongly, especially when the use is prolonged, can permanently damage a dog’s larynx. But they do have their use as a training tool, again, if properly used.
The collar has to be put on correctly, for starters. Standing in front of the dog, hold the collar so that it looks like the letter “P”. Slip it over the front of the dog’s head, with the stem of the P held in the left hand, and the loop of the “P” in your right hand, going over the dog’s head. When the leash is attached to the ring, the collar should tighten and pull up at the top of the ring, not the bottom.
This photo shows the correct way to put on the collar, but not the correct way to use it. Another pulling contest. Sigh.
The idea is that you can then correct the dog by giving a quick jerk and releasing just as quickly, so that the lead goes slack again. The correction has to be given the moment the dog starts to pull, and the release has to be fast.
All too many people simply apply constant pressure as the dog continues to pull. This is how damage to the larynx occurs. I suppose I’d have to reluctantly say that if you aren’t going to teach your dog to walk beside you without pulling, you’d be better off with a wide flat collar which will minimize the damage to your dog’s throat, or even, heaven help us, a harness.
We used nylon slip/choke collars at the kennel, because they are difficult to escape from.
Don’t leave any kind of slip collar, but especially a chain link collar, on your dog when they are alone.
The risk of the loop getting caught and choking the dog is higher with this kind of collar than with a flat collar. The rings of a chain link collar provide multiple opportunities for catching on things. And there is no way to incorporate a quick release or breakaway feature.
Prong collars and electric collars: Google these types of collar and you will read unequivocally condemning statements like “There is no reason to use [these] on your dog.” This particular expert proclaims that since “science” (??) has proven that positive reinforcement techniques are more effective” any type of aversive collar should be banned, including choke collars. In fact, she tells us triumphantly, they are banned in some countries.
Yeah, well, if we are going to play the “they ban this in so-and-so land” card, then I guess Pitbulls are doomed because they too are banned in lots of places as being dangerous.
Another site informed me that even the potential to harm the dog is enough reason to ban any device. By that definition, then all collars and harnesses should be outlawed, because any and all of them can cause harm IF they are used on a dog who pulls.
If you really cut through all the high falutin’ ‘moral’ rhetoric, it comes down to this. It is the pulling that is the culprit, regardless of the restraint device used. Pulling while being restrained with even the most neutral collar will result in injury to the dog over the long haul.
Train, don’t restrain.
I will grant that some devices will do more damage than others if used incorrectly. And I will acknowledge, again, that a lot of people use collars, harnesses and head halters incorrectly. The photo that accompanied one article railing against the evil of the prong collar showed a dog with wounds caused by a prong collar having been tightened so much that the prongs actually broke the skin. The collar had then obviously been left on long enough for festering wounds to result. No sane person would use a prong collar that way. This is in no way a fair representation of the use of a prong collar.
But here’s a news flash. I have seen dogs with festering, infected sores under a flat collar that had been tightened to strangulation level and then left on after it got wet.
Donald McCaig has written extensively about his life with Border Collies. He has owned and trained many dogs. He has written much and thought hard about training techniques from the (now) old-fashioned aversive training to modern ‘positive only’ methods. His takeaway, with which I fully agree, is that
the great danger in training dogs according to any method, or with any tool is that the method or tool will be misapplied, or applied to the wrong dog.
He believed instinctively that electric collars were cruel and bad. But when he took the trouble to investigate and watch them being used by someone who knew what they were doing, he had to acknowledge their usefulness in certain, very limited conditions. Some years later, he did use an electric collar on one of his dog who was eating deer carcasses which were infected with botulism. If he could not correct the behaviour, his dog would not be able to roam their hundreds of acres that bordered a national park where deer carcasses were to be found. He undertook training in the proper method, he had a trainer accompany him and his dog, and it only took one correction for the dog’s behaviour to cease. They have been used in a similar way to prevent dogs from approaching rattlesnakes.
The idea here is to teach the dog what she needs to know, then put the electric or prong collar away.
Idiots and the cruel will cause damage with any tool, but certainly some tools are more dangerous, and the consequence of misuse, more serious. Prong collars and electric collars need to be used with even more caution than other collars and restraints. They are a device of last resort for only a very few dogs and for very specific purposes.
But I do firmly believe they have a place in training certain dogs, when used intelligently and correctly. My beloved Toby was one such dog. Yes, I used a prong collar. Hate me if you must, but before you do, consider the reason why I tried it, and the results of trying it.
Collars, head halters and harnesses are tools. Each type has its function and its place in training. But none of them are magic solutions. None of them are universally good for all dogs, regardless of temperament, size or issues of health or personality. None of them fit every training goal.
Most importantly, none of them relieve owners of the responsibility for training their dogs – and themselves. Finding the right tool to accomplish their goals in the most humane and most logical way is just one piece of that puzzle.
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