German Wirehaired Pointer Club of America

[mike]

So what is the general consensus on the age for starting on a e-collar?

Mike

[Jon P]

The age to start a pup wearing an e-collar has less to do with the age of the dog and more to do with your knowledge of how to use it. Using it properly will depend on your ability to read your dog. A dog tells you through its actions and temperament what it will accept. If you have this covered and are well versed in e-collar methods, I think the age of the dog is less important. I have let pups wear the collar as young as 5 months, putting it on as a signal that we are going out to do fun things.
I have steered young dogs to respond to the come command at an early age more for safety reasons. Outside of that, I'm not a big advocate of using the collar on young dogs and generally let them develop the drive and reach they're capable of.
_________________
Jon P

[ENL]

What Jon said.



I started putting my e-collar on at four months for doing "fun stuff." It's turned on, but I've only used it once on her when she was just after five months because she took off over a road after a pheasant -- and I just nicked her on a very low setting (just that nick, with a sit command, made her stop and turn around to look at me -- which is all I needed). It's purely a safety device right now that i probably won't seriously try to introduce into training until warmer weather and she is nearing 10-12 months old -- over live birds. I like this period of time where she is *excited* it's going on because she knows we're going to be working on something -- I just haven't really introduced her to training with it.

But that's where jon is especially right; I think I screwed a GSP up with it when I first tried it on her at six months -- I used it for ALL training. She got e-collar smart after I used it too much during our regular "games." She was great hunting, but it was much harder to have the GSP listen to commands when the collar wasn't around and we were just doing stuff.