the best citronella bark collar? - Page 1

Hello! I need some help picking a bark collar for our 1 year old GSD. The dog was barking (she does bark when she is outside) and a neighbor from half a block away started yelling at me to "shut that damn dog up, it's been barking all day!!". She doesn't bark all day but enough get on your nerves I suppose if you are outside to hear her and not in your house.

I put her inside and the more I thought about it the more pissed I got. We live in a pretty small town and I've got his mail many many times. I've always went out of my way and took it to his house to drop it off so he got it right away. He could have at least had the common courtesy to come over and have a talk with me about the dog before he turned into a dick. So anyway i started up the mower to mow the grass hoping that he would come on over to have a little talk but he never showed up, which in the end was the best thing for both of us.

Now that I've calmed down a bit I realize that I should have done something to stop her barking before it became an issue with the neighbors. So I've decided to get some type of bark collar and would like to try a citronella one I think first to see if we can get her to stop barking while she is outside.

Can those of you that have used these collars give me a bit of advice on which ones (brands) work best?

thanks,
Mick

Hello Mick,
I really do not have any advice on bark collars.  But as I read your post I wondered to myself hmmm why is the dog barking?  I would try figuring out what she is barking at because it may be something simple.  For example RLHAR started a thread about how his dog was barking constantly at night and it seemed that he was barking at nothing.  Turned out it was birds.  Not sure what you plan to do with your dog but if you use a anti bark collar to stop the barking it may have a negative effect.  The dog could stop alerting all together and thing like that.  JMO....curious to hear what others have to say about this.

Thanks for the reply. She is a moderate to somewhat high drive female depending on what she wants and what is going on at the time. She runs up and down the fence barking at the dogs next door (we bring her in when she does this). She runs up and down the fence when the two little neighbor boys come over to see her (I've now had to chase them off to play with their own dogs LOL). She runs to the fence and barks when ever she sees something on the street behind the house (kids, another dog, can be about anything). The neighbor behind us have a cat that she will bark at pretty much all day if we let her. It really can be anything that catches her attention. We've tried to tell her "NO" and it stops for a little bit but not very long. We've brought her into the house to teach her that when she barks she has to come in and can't play and yup, that just taught her to bark when she wants to come in the house. Tonight she was barking at the cat behind us when the guy started yelling.

With training, playing in the house, taking walks, ect. she gets a pretty fair amount of exercise and attention so I don't think it's because she is bored, I think it's just that she sees things and gets excited and barks.

P.S. I am training her to do obedience, tracking, and SAR. Not to sure she needs to bark much at those three things. I'm not all that interested in doing bite work with her although the head trainer at our little Shutzhund club thinks she would do very well at it.

i know how you feel my female did this but we corrected it as a puppy she would bark at anything that moved when she was 6 months. we put a bark collar on her on medium she barked once and now she will only bark at intruders shes quiet the rest of the time. i dont use the bad spray things because my girly likes sour apple and most of the other bad tasteing spray stuff so lol. i do think it is boredom that shes barking my girly is a SAR dog and i can work her all day then put her in the yard and she will dig. i would say dont leave her outside. if you are gone kennel her or leave her indoors. i have kennels in my garage where i live people steal shepherds so mine only go out to potty then they are back inside.

but there relly dosent seem to be a reason for her to be barking at the kids and cat ect so to me i would say boredom. put frozen blocks of food in your yard keep her buisy get her mind going.



 what ever you choose hope it works

I have a great citronella collar story. :)  one of my RCMP buddies put one on his GSD he was a real pain in the car and would not be quiet so on would go the collar... well somehow the collar flipped around so it was facing the drivers seat :)   Well fido started barking and shot his handler right in the face :)  the dog upon seeing the handler rubbing his eyes etc started barking like a mad man!!!  He was actually squirting his handler on purpose!!! Damn it was funny, the rest if us on the outside of the car darn near wet our pants!!!

LMAO!! Yup these rotten GSD's are smart dogs. That is one of my worries with one of these collars, that she will figure a way to work around it. I've ordered one  off of ebay. It should be here in a few days. We have training tomorrow and the head trainer wants to talk with me before I try the new collar and see if we can avoid using it with some new training methods.

One way or the other I have to get her to quiet down. If one neighbor is bugged by her barking I'm sure there are others also that just haven't said something. Beside the fact that if the guy yells at me like that again we are going to have some real problems which isn't what I want but what I will deal with if I have to. AHHHH yes living in town....not always great is it?