Shock collars can harm your dog. The electrostatic shock can cause psychological distress for your pet, including phobias and high levels of stress, and can result in unhealthy increases in heart rate and painful burns to your dog’s skin.

Shock collars are often misused and can create fear, anxiety and aggression in your dog toward you or other animals. While they may suppress unwanted behavior, they do not teach a dog what you would like them to do instead and therefore should not be used.

Shock collars can cause dogs physical pain, injury (ranging from burns to cardiac fibrillation), and psychological stress, including severe anxiety and displaced aggression. Individual animals vary in their temperaments and pain thresholds; a shock that seems mild to one dog might be severe to another.

The Fear With shock training, some dogs may learn to fear people, objects, or situations they associate with the collar.

Not only are the devices cruel, but they can have a longer term impact on top of the immediate pain the animal suffers. That’s the warning from an expert who insists that behaviour correction via a shock collar can have a huge impact on a dog’s personality.

While many people will say that electronic collars don’t really hurt the dog — “it is just a tickle, a spray, or a little stim,” — they would simply not work if they weren’t at least somewhat aversive. The dog must want to avoid the spray or shock, or there would be no motivation to stop barking.

With shock collars, there is a greater chance of abuse (such as the trainer administering a shock for the sole purpose of punishment, not to train the dog) and potentially misuse (such as when the trainer administers the shocks at the wrong time).