[Ed]

Why does he wear it in the house? I’m curious

[Brian]

Mine slides down on my Lab. Taking a link out is too tight as well. I use the prong collar when walking or running outside with him.

[Tara]

He wears in house cause trainer wants us to us that as a correction.

[Stella]

I think it’s ok if they are a bit loose vs too tight. Want it snug but With wear and use they do tend to slip down a little. The key is to make sure your doing proper corrections with it (popping not pulling). Also I would be cautious with it with such a young puppy.

[Ed]

Interesting. As far as I’m aware a prong collar is not meant to be used for long periods of time. Might also ask Robert on the AMA. If I remember right it also comes with a warning label on that regard.

[Ed]

BTW 18 weeks in my opinion is way to young for a prong. I would definitely be looking for another trainer.

[Tara]

Our trainer was recommended by our breeder. He also has two adult Mals with all sorts of titles. The prong is not on more than an hour at a time and only when in house and on walks or training. He is responding to it really well. He was not responding to the martingale at all.

[Ed]

I have seen a couple of videos where Robert goes over fitting the collar. It is a bit tight and does not readily slide down, though given enough time I think it may. He goes for the smaller sizes, as they give a sharper correction and allow for more adjustments. Also Robert obviously uses it “correctly” meaning just for a (usually) light snap/tug. On my adult female I do exactly the opposite because it is only my dog walker that uses it. She is the best one around, but does not really want to finesse those skills. Like most people you see on the street she uses the prong collar to help hold the dog back because she would not have the physical strength to do without it. So I have the blunter tips of the larger size collar, and I leave it lose to minimize how much digging while rotating the collar will do. Also the dogs walk pretty good so she only needs to hold her back if something happens during the walk.

[Joy]

I find that mine slides down if my dog is in front of me instead of beside me like she should be. I have a double handled leash and when I have the prong on her I use the shorter handle to keep her in position. Hoping that one day she won’t need either!

[Ed]

I would like to take something back. I’m about to start working with a trainer that Robert recommends and in her methodology the prong is left on the dog the whole day and removed at night. Now it is too early for me to understand whether that is for my dogs, for my objectives, or a more general principle that she advocates. She also starts pups on the prong earlier than I would. But we reach out to experts to learn from them, not to tell them what we think we know. So we’ll be following her guidelines. On the plus side I just introduced the prong to the puppy and we had a very short but great fun walk. Also since they are wearing the prong I walked them individually and I was dumbfounded to how easy (knock on wood) it was to walk one dog at a time on prong collars versus 3 dogs together on flat collars, which is normally what we do. LOL. They obviously were very happy to have the personal attention. So I would like to take back what I said about looking for another trainer because he/she did not conform to whatever pre-established idea I had at that time, or have now 🙂

EDIT: the puppy is 1 week short of 10 months old. I think I’ll have to remember to remove the prong if they begin to roughhouse, or they might break a tooth or something. Hmmmm