i have a 3mo old GSP and am wondering when I can start him out on an e-collar. I would think he is too young now but my local BassPro is having its hunting extravaganza and they are on sale so am gonna get one. So when can I start using it? Thx

Bob

When he starts acting like an idiot. Just kidding. I think discretion should be the key word when first thinking about using an e collar. If you are working with your dog a lot, you should be the first to know when to slap that bad boy on. I had one on my 6 month old female last year and it worked great. Thats why I like the dogtra with the vibrate feature. That vibration is just enough to get a young pups attention. Especially if they have had a small taste of the real thing. A nice side effect of useing an e collar on a younger dog. Is that when you put that collar on, they begin to associate it with going out and having fun. Thus negating some of the negatives they might associate with the collar. Good luck.

most of the time, you will want your dog to be able to perform commands consitantly 9 out of 10 times during yard/rope work before you begin to reinforce with a collar. The dog must understand the association. There are instances that you will use a collar to break a dog from a bad habit or strict avoidance training where you will not issue a command also (i.e. snake breaking). but really, if you know what you are doing with the collar, and make sure that you are "associating" the juice with the action (or non-action)... then you can start pretty early (the word 'no' and 'off' for example). puppies have a pretty short attention span and you can't just start smokin a young pup when he's just being a pup.

ecollars are wonderful tools, but they should be used with great care, because they are easy to ruin a dog with when used improperly. they can speed up a training program, but they are by NO means a substitute for the training itself... they are a 'tool', just like a checkcord, or a bird launcher or a dummy. I've said this many times, but if you are having to zap your dog more than two or three times in a training session, your need to put the collar up and go back to basic yard work and work on your training program.

I would say that I typically begin to introduce it and collar condition around 6 months, but that really depends on the dogs progress, not necessarily his age.

You should use an e collar once you have fully trained a dog withOUT using an e collar. Once you can do that, then think about what age you want to use one on your pup.

If you have already trained a dog without one, then most say about a year. Lab guys who like robots will say more like 5 months.