Murph’s leash and choke chain
Spring fever is most definitely in the air. Since we’ve had some spells of excellent walking-in-the-park or on longer-walks-through-the-neighborhood weather recently, Murph and I have been getting out more. So has everyone else. Inevitably we stop to chit chat. Sometimes with strangers, sometimes with people we already know. Some of these encounters are pleasant, some are not.
Lately I’ve had two people on separate occasions comment about Murph’s choke chain. Mainly they’ve expressed unfavorable opinions about the use of them.
“I think that is so cruel. Those things are so painful,” one lady said to me during the most recent (and unpleasant) of these encounters.
Thinking she might have mistaken Murph’s for one of the pinch variety I said, “It doesn’t have the little prongs on it. It’s just a regular choke collar.”
“I see that, but it’s still hurtful to your dog. Who I’m surprised you’d even put one on. He’s so well mannered.”
Yes, he is, but that’s because of the choke chain.
Once upon a time Aimee wrote about her Moose’s special trick of slipping from his collar. How if he angles his head a certain way he can slip free of it.
Murph knows that same trick. When we first got him he’d perform it from time to time. Not all the time. Only when he really, really, really saw something he wanted to go after and we were holding him back from. Like a squirrel several houses ahead, or maybe his buddy Tucker coming down the road.
That’s what made it worse. Not being able to anticipate if he’d do it or when. (Because sometimes he’d see those triggers and not be affected.) Sometimes it was funny him ditching both the collar and us and leaving us there with a dogless leash, but mostly it was nerve racking. (For the most part he did it on our street, which was relatively quiet, but we lived near a busy one. My fear was he’d bolt for the road before I could catch him. Or, worse, we’d be walking on the path along that road and decide to slip his collar one day.)
I knew I had to either break the behavior or prevent it, but how?
My first solution was the same as what Aimee had tried: tightening the collar. Except I quickly realized that short of nearly strangling poor Murph I could not get the collar tight enough. He always managed to wiggle out of it.
It was one of our neighbor’s who helped us. He lent us a video he swore by about training dogs using choke chains. He’d used it on his own, who used to pull really bad, but after trying the technique in the video she stopped.
So I gave it a go and what do you know? Murph couldn’t slip out of it and became easier to manage when he tried to chase things.
But I learned the right way to use a choke chain. Which I explain to people like the woman above.
“You know, choke chains get bad raps. I think because of their name. They only choke if you put them on wrong. They should be called control collars. And I need such a device for my dog to keep him safe.”
Courtney Mroch writes about animals great and small in Pets and the harmony and strife that encompasses married life in Marriage. For a full listing of her articles click here.
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