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0:38  What a beautiful fall New England Day to do yard drills with our Brittany Spaniel. Hi, I'm Jennifer Broome with Quinebaug Kennels. We have here, Freedom, a six month old Brittany Spaniel that we've diligently been working on the whoa command with the use of slip leads. And now after our hundreds of repetitions to reinforce and teach a whoa command, she's ready to learn some e-collar conditioning around the belly to teach and reinforce the whoa command. This shouldn't be too difficult of a transition for Freedom because Freedom's already had a good week of practice with our whoa command, creating a sensation of pressure around her belly with a slip lead that I can clearly control.

1:20 My favorite choice of remote electronic collars are Tritronics. I've used them for well over 15 years, think they're a very, very reliable product with wonderful customer service. And I have here a Tritronics Pro200 E-Collar. I prefer to use longer contact points when I do this drill so that I don't have to put the strap too tight. So I have the advantage of having longer contact points so I'm not getting too snug with the strap.

1:48 So I have this female pup here and I'm going to put the e-collar around her flank in a similar area where I earlier had our slip lead. I want to make sure that the prongs here are making contact but I really don't need it too tight. So put it on the light level that maybe I could slip a couple fingers underneath. And I can feel that these prongs here are making contact with her belly because what I'm going to be looking for is to create a tickling sensation after I give the whoa command, the exact same sensation that I've done with hundreds of repetitions with our slip lead. Now I have to answer this question because a lot of people ask me this. What happens when you have a male dog? Well, I really don't want this to interfere at all with their male parts we'll call it. So I like to put the prongs here, of the e-collar, right in front of that so it's closer to his ribcage in the front of his belly so we're not interfering with or causing any undue pressure or pain to the dog. I think that you'll figure it out. The idea here though is to be able to create contact against the dog's belly and creating a sensation of a tickle which has them lift their belly up and helps to reinforce our whoa command.

3:08 So Freedom's fairly new to this and as you can see, she's really not bothered by the fact this is around her belly in the first place because she's had a lot of reinforcement with our slip lead. Freedom is very distracted by tweety birds flying around here and that's fine. So in our continued yard training we're going to practice now hundreds of repetitions of the whoa command. The sequence that I'm going to do is: I'm going to call her on her name with a here command or a heal command; I'm going to command whoa clearly and concisely and just on a level 1 with a continuous button, I'm going to give Freedom a little tickle with the e-collar which will stop her. And again, it's a very easy transition because she's had many, many repetitions of this with her slip lead.

3:54 So here we go. Let's see how Freedom reacts to this. Freedom, here. Whoa. Tickle. And I'm going to say tickle when I push the continuous button down on our Tritronics e-collar to create the sensation. What a beautiful reaction She didn't bite at the collar. She didn't try to sit. She didn't try to run away. And this shows that we've done very nice homework with our slip lead around the belly, prior to this. This is how smoothly this transition should go. And this allows us the opportunity to really be able to practice our whoa commands without so much as the hands on because the next step will be her running around the field later and I don't have to have her on the slip lead. She can be at a distance; I can command, whoa and I could tickle her belly, enforce the whoa command with the simple use of a remote, electronic training collar.

4:46 So let's see some repetitions and how Freedom reacts. Freedom, here. Whoa. See how that freezes her? What an effective training tool this is. Again, we're not using the e-collar here as a correction. We're using it as a tickle, mild reinforcement to keep that belly up and to keep her in this nice stance. A couple more times. Freedom, here. Whoa. Good. Freedom, here. Whoa. Good.

5:19 Now, let's talk about some negative reactions If you can't even get this strap on your dog and they're flipping out, then you should probably go right back to doing some slip lead work because your pup's not ready for the pressure yet. We really don't want them biting at this remote collar. We want them comfortable with the sensation of this collar around their belly. That's probably one of the most asked questions that I get, if we put the collar around their belly and the dog sort of overreacts to it. Another thing is, I want it to be a tickle sensation. I really don't want to create pain going up to a level 2 or 3. So with your tougher dog, maybe I'll do a 2. However, since she's reacting so positively with simply a one tickle, then I'm going to keep with that.

6:08 She's moving here a little, so let's practice our command. Freedom, here. Whoa. Good. And look at how that effectively freezes her. So we have now hundreds of more repetitions to do in our yard situation. She's sniffing at it a little. There you go. We've got hundreds more repetitions to do in our  yard situation, so we're creating an environment of repetition, of consistency and of success before I would feel comfortable with letting her run around in our hunting field with this e-collar around her belly. So we're going to get to training. Good girl.

6:45 [Closing]

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