Boulder trainer intends to ban restrictive collars

Daily Camera

A Boulder woman is starting a campaign she hopes will lead to a citywide ban on the sale of dog collars that choke, prong and shock.

“I don’t want residents in Boulder to feel alienated or badly if they’re using them,” said Mary Angilly, a professional dog trainer. “This is about educating people and showing them there are other ways.”

Angilly is still working out her plan of action and starting to build her coalition, but she said she aspires to get this proposed ban on the 2018 ballot in Boulder.

If the city does end up approving a ban on these three controversial forms of dogtraining equipment, it will be the first in the United States to do so, though some similar efforts have succeeded in a handful of places outside of the country, including in Canada and the United Kingdom.

The case Angilly makes is that dog owners should train their animals with positive reinforcement.

“My argument, and most trainers who are against the use of this equipment, is not that it doesn’t work. Punishment and using force and fear to train dogs can totally work. The main issue is the many potential fallouts.”

Among the side effects observed in some dogs when owners use fear- or pain-based training equipment, she said, are added stress; suppressed or unusually high aggression; and emotional shut-down and stunting.

Bridgette Chesne, director of animal behavior and sheltering at the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, agrees. The Humane Society has run ad campaigns in support of the message Angilly is now working to spread.

“I think in the last decade there’s been more evidence to suggest the unnecessary nature of intimidation force imposed upon our pet families. The election to do it in a more gentle, friendlier, more positive way — we believe in the long run that really fosters a more successful relationship between that pet and that parent,” Chesne said.

She added, “When we show dogs what we want them to do and we offer them reinforcement to get them to do so, it gets them to our end goal in a way that’s fun and engaging and optimistic.”

Angilly has a long way to go if, in fact, her idea is to turn into a ballot measure. At a minimum, she’ll have to collect thousands of petition signatures from registered voters.

But she’ll also have to figure out what she wants and does not want her campaign to address.

In her “ideal world,” she said, the city would make illegal both the sale and the use of the three collars she’s identified as being problematic.

Given, however, that no place else in America has issued such a ban, she’s looking to start small, in order to give her campaign as good a chance as possible at winning support and affecting change.

Dog owners and enthusiasts Friday at the Valmont Dog Park in northeast Boulder offered varying takes on Angilly’s idea, but were generally much more comfortable with the use of shock collars, which are sometimes called e-collars, than they were with chokes and prongs.

Shock collars usually have different voltage levels available to the user, who, with some products, can control the collar through a remote control.