I bought the Educator 1000 months ago and have yet to put it on him. We love taking Lachlan in the backcountry and letting him run free. Such a joy as you can see in my avatar. His recall is great unless he has something more interesting to do and see. My plan was to get through a training course that included recall training and then introduce the e-collar as another way to communicate over longer distances.

This winter we got snow shoes so we could take him off trail and have less chance of running into other people and especially other dogs. Whereas he used to mostly stay in sight, his disappearances seem to be getting longer and longer. On the last hike we got really scared. If he runs back to the parking lot, he would wreak havoc. If we lose him in the woods my wife would have to be institutionalized.

So if we give up on letting him off-leash in non-fenced situations, is there any point to introducing the e-collar?

Absolutely. The ecollar, properly trained, will allow off-leash use. I've stopped Ami in full prey drive sprinting after deer, grouse, etc. As long as A: its turned on and B: I push the right button (I have a 2 dog system) but those are rapidly fixed. No way would I take my guys off leash without ecollar.

I have yet to see a dog with perfect recall... or perfect anything, for that matter, without the ability to correct the dog. I can definitely see the appeal of having an off-leash dog in the back country though.

I think, in this case, an ecollar (and appropriate training) is exactly what you need. A feature I would love to have would be a geofence option where you can specify how far the dog can go away from you.

dvflyer wrote:

I have yet to see a dog with perfect recall... or perfect anything, for that matter, without the ability to correct the dog.  I can definitely see the appeal of having an off-leash dog in the back country though.

I think, in this case, an ecollar (and appropriate training) is exactly what you need.  A feature I would love to have would be a geofence option where you can specify how far the dog can go away from you.

Dogtra is almost to this. Right now they have a collar that allows you to build a geofence and will alert you when your dog leaves it. The collar has a built in shock but you have to manually hit it. It doesn't autobite when they leave the boundary yet. I suspect it won't be long though until this becomes a feature on it. There are many tools out there that are similar in the gun dog world. You don't hear much about them outside the gun dog world though because they are expensive and only people professionally utilizing their dogs for work tend to spend that kind of money. Frankly though, a dog should not be outside your sight. Allowing a dog to travel outside your sight is allowing them to get into, or meet, many unsavory things without you being able to intervene in a timely manner. Best to not worry about setting a certain travel distance and just use a normal Ecollar and bring them back if they are traveling out of sight. Much easier to adjust for terrain that way.

What Jenn said - even with ecollar, I keep the dogs within sight. If they start to go over a hill or behind thick vegetation, I call them back. Most of the time, now, they just stay within a 100' radius of me. They really like sniffing, pawing and studying stuff on the ground rather than galloping off...

Agree on all points, Jenn. An extended family member just went through quite a bit of training with his hunting dog. He and I discussed various points regarding ecollars and the training methods he used with his dog (forced fetch had me scratching my head, but I guess it's a thing).