So I bought an e-collar...
I've been curious about that whole side of training for a while now. I still need alot more education (and I'm looking forward to it!) But here are my observations firsthand from someone who's never used an e-collar before.
For reference I purchased an ET-300 aka a mini educator.
The collar and remote both take the same charger and the stock charger can charge both at the same time!
The remote is smaller than I expected. I was thinking it was the size of an orange but it's only about the size of a medium apple. It fits nicely in the hand.
Keep the manual! Some of the more complex functions are not intuitive.
Of course after charging it up, the first thing I did was try it on myself. The collar goes from 1-100. Personally for my purposes, I likely won't need to go above a 20.
Couldn't feel a stim on my palm until about 12 and couldn't fully appreciate the feeling until I hit 15. At the lower levels, I wouldn't describe it as painful, it's not a painful feeling. You know when you move and you randomly get a twinge in your arm/hand? A spark under the skin? It's like that, similar to the pins and needles sensation. At 15 I could sit under a full 10 seconds of stim no problem. The stim did not linger either. No doubt though if the stim wasn't expected or the dog didn't know what it was being corrected for, even low levels could result in a fly-dog; a dog that does not leave the safety of the owner's "bubble" for fear of being corrected for "disobedience".
The vibration was just a single level. Same as a medium level haptic on your phone. No big deal. Easy enough to do an CER for most dogs.
Ideally with more work on our parts, we want to use the collars to teach Karma (a short fuse dog) better judgment on disengaging and hopefully be able to have her off leash with the others (muzzled of course) AND to teach Abby who's selectively deaf vibration cues for recall.
