103 Reviews

106 out of 107 people found this review helpful:
To Whoof, or not to whoof, that is the question

This is a must have if you live within the city limits, have fussy or close neighbors in proximity to your yard, or have a strict home owners association that prohibits excessive dog barking. I am a lab breeder and own 3 of these units. I am very pleased with the performance and function of this product because it stops "nuisance barking" by administering a minimal buzz that gradually gets stronger the longer the dog barks the lowest setting delivers your common "prankster hand buzzer" volt. And if your too squeamish about buzzing your dog, there is a "lemon spray" version of this exact brand that also works well too. Instead of delivering a buzz, it puffs a lemon deterant near the snout. For more stubborn dogs, the buzzer seems to work better. In no way is this harmful to your dog, but rather more humane discipline than verbal or physical correction by you, the owner. I believe all dogs are pleasers and want you to be happy with them. If your dog doesn't have a bark collar, most people tend to over correct or not be completely steady in the level of correction being a swat on the hind end, hopefully nothing more abusive, or other methods. The end result is your dog barks when your not around. That's why these collars work so well, it adjusts and corrects only as needed, and with as little force as needed, and will never over correct, or over punish, like we humans sometimes do when we're angry or sleep deprived due to a BARKING DOG!!!! By using this bark collar, the dog, in a sence, is making a choice whether or not it wants to continue barking incesantly, which is a much better training technique. This collar will still allow them to bark, don't get me wrong, but the ongoing nuisance barking will cease. These collars work great and allow more opportunities for us to reward the dogs for good behavior instead of correcting them for barking constantly. You'll love your dog more and he'll love you more too by being a good owner and keeping everyone happy. I would definitely buy more of this brand if my other units get damaged somehow.

81 out of 82 people found this review helpful:
It definitely works, but...

I gave this product 5 stars because it definitely works as advertised. Be forewarned, however, that your dog's reaction may vary greatly from others. We purchased two. On the one dog, it worked great - after a few weeks of training, she stops barking as soon as we take out the collar and stays silent. For this dog, the device is worth it's weight in gold! The other dog, however, had very bad experiences - when she is shocked, she cries (she has a weird bark/cry/growl), but the device thinks she is barking and continues to zap, and she becomes a wreck. Thus, we can't use it on her, but on the other dog it works great.
A few other notes: it works by detecting vibrations in the dog's neck, not by sound (ie, another dog barking won't set it off), so the collar needs to be tight. If a dog has thick hair, it may not work as well. It will also take several weeks to train your dog properly with the device - the instructions indicate that you can't keep it on for more than 12 hours at a time or the dog may develop a rash. Thus, you will have to work the collar into your routine, putting it on and removing it based on your dog's bark patterns. Finally, the shock is definitely not painful (you can test it by rubbing it against your jeans, it's just a static shock), but your dog's reaction to this may be different from others. With this in mind, I do highly recommend this product! Good luck!

28 out of 28 people found this review helpful:
Incredibly effective!

My recently adopted, very excitable dog has had the collar on a total of
maybe 3 hours over two days. Already, *without* the collar on, he has
absolutely stopped barking at (a) the vacuum cleaner, (b) the neighbor's
perpetually yapping (instigator) dog right on the other side of the
fence, and (c) squirrels (real or imagined) in the trees behind the
house. The transformation is absolutely beyond belief. Get over any "I
don't want to hurt my baby" thing you may have going on - I did too -
and buy this product if you have a barking problem. I'm floored by how
effective this thing is and wish I'd known about it years ago. I realize
that training isn't complete at this point but I've seen instantaneous
and really dramatic improvement. Good luck and I hope you have even half
the success I'm having with this product. Note to those who got a defective one - try again!

Added 2 days after my initial review - it gets better! Tried this on my other young dog, adopted a month or so earlier, who is pretty good about barking except while I'm preparing her food. Then, she barks like crazy and runs back and forth. It's cute and no problem at my house, but it's not cool when we're visiting my mom's apartment in a retirement community. I stuck the collar on her before starting food prep tonight and got two (count 'em!) barks during the entire prep process. Normally I wouldn't be able to count the frantic, nonstop barks during food prep. This change was astonishing.

I have become more aware of the need to be on top of things since I have two relatively young and energetic dogs. They may go from a "barking's not good now" situation (barking at the fence at passerby) to a "barking's OK now" situation (chasing each other around the house) pretty quickly. You need to be ready to take off (or put on) the shock collar at such transitions during training. But I'm finding that even occasional concentration on this is yielding bigtime resuts faster than I would have ever believed.

16 out of 16 people found this review helpful:
Truly put me at ease.

When my husband suggested that we get a bark control collar for our Pitt/Australian Shepherd mix, I nearly cried because I knew he was right. She was disturbing the whole neighborhood with her barking, and we knew that our tolerant neighbors would only be tolerant for so long.

I searched for hours doing research, trying to find the right collar, and I decided on this one for one main reason: it gives increasingly more intense corrections every time the dog barks, and it has an automatic shut off in case the dog freaks out.

When it arrived, the first thing I did was try it on myself. I wasn't going to put something potentially harmful on my dog until I knew what it felt like. The first correction feels like a small pinch, not even equivilent to a shot at the doctors office. Truly just enough to get your attention. The second correction is probably equivilent to a shot. The third got a little squeak out of me, and the fourth was clearly painful, but not enough to make me uncomfortable since the first three were so slight.

After that, I put it on my dog and waited for someone to knock on the door. When they did, she barked once and got a really confused expression on her face. She barked again and tried to sniff the collar. She didn't bark again. When we put her outside, she tested the collar, as I expected. On the third bark she gave a short cry and stopped barking. Ever since that test, she has only gotten to a third bark twice, and that was when a strange dog came near her fence.

Overall, I am VERY satisfied with this collar. After only 5 days of wearing it, she is generally bark free without it. We only put it on her now when we are gone for the day, as this means she is outside for a longer period of time than she is used to.

I highly reccomend this collar to anyone who is considering this type of devise. I think that it is an excelent and humane teaching tool. There is another review below from a pet owner who claims it was very painful when she tried it on herself. The only reason for this I can think of is that she tried it on herself before the collar had a chance to reset itself back to the minimum correction, as her dog was in distress when she took it off.

15 out of 16 people found this review helpful:
Mine were defective- wouldn't put my dogs through that again

We have 3 dogs (2 pugs and a pitbull mix) that bark nonstop while the house next door is being shown to prospective tenants/buyers. Unfortunately the house is being shown while we are at work and not home to stop the barking. I was approached by a potential neighbor who demanded our dogs de-barked as she wouldn't buy the house with all that racket. We called the HOA, and while there weren't any official complaints we knew we had only a short time to correct it before one was made. Behavior training worked great, or so we thought, the dogs would not bark at all when we were home. Then we got a letter from the HOA- dogs bark constantly when house is being shown and you are not home. Great- now what do we do? We only had 30 days to stop the barking until we got fined.

As a last resort we looked into static shock collars. After reading all the reviews on Amazon and other petstore sites I decided on the Petsafe collars. I got the collars and had the dogs wear them over the weekend so that we were home to supervise. I followed the directions exactly and put the collars on tight. Our pug Buster shook his head and it buzzed and shocked him. He scratched the collar weaved part- not the box- and it shocked him. Hubby came downstairs, tightened the collar even more assuming the collar was sliding as Buster scratched and shook his head. As there were no more mishaps I thought the collars were working correctly. But then again the dogs didn't bark once when we were home as they were trained...

The next day we leave for work and feeling uneasy I put the collars on the dogs. I was hoping for no mishaps as we wouldn't be home to take the collars off if something went wrong. Hubby got home first, went into the backyard to check on the dogs and Buster was standing in the dogrun shivering getting shocked repeatedly nonstop. The other dog's collars were beeping and buzzing as well. Were any of the dogs barking or whining? NO!!! They weren't making a sound! He took off all the collars right away and when I got home we tested the sensitivity by gently tapping the collars on the kitchen counter. Each collar buzzed and shocked no matter how softly we tapped the counter. The collars would go off if we tapped one next to it! That is WAY too sensitive for our liking, and the fact that the dogs were getting shocked for merely breathing and NOT barking is just cruel.

Amazon refunded us our money in full (including all shipping charges) as they were all defective. I would never buy these again and would never leave dogs alone with this collar on.