Sunday, January 13, 2008

Canine delusions

Recently my dog has decided that it's a fun game to run back in forth in the yard barking his head off at every little movement in the front yard. To combat this I started looking into bark collars, I don't think I want a shock one and wanted to see what else was out there.

I'm not one of those people that doesn't believe in shock collars, I actually have a training collar for our trips to the field. It's simply that I think (hope) Rikin will get the lesson fairly quickly and I don't want to spend a small fortune.

Anyway, I've used the sonic collars (emits a high pitched tone) before and had good luck with it. I was curious about some of the others though, mainly a collar that sprays a citrus solution into the dog's face. While browsing some reviews I came across this one. What made this funny was this line:

"When I did finally manage to fill it, Bonnie figured out that all she had to do was bark continuously for several minutes to empty the cartridge! After about a week or two, the collar had absolutely no effect on controlling her barking at all! "

Pet owners crack me up, they always want to believe the most of their animal's intelligence (except me of course, I know my dog is brilliant). By my reckoning, there are two explanations for the above scenario:

A) The dog actually did figure out that the bark is what causes the spray. She then reasoned that the cartridge contains 3 ounces of liquid, and each time the spray is activated it shoots about 1/20 of a teaspoon. She then did the doggie math and figured out that if she barked approximately 360 times the cartridge would be empty. This would then leave her the luxury to bark as much as she wanted without any repercussions.

OR

B) Bonnie is too stupid to connect the barking to the spray and simply continued to bark - wondering all the while what that lovely orange smell was.

I'll lay my money on scenario B, with no offense meant to the canine genius Bonnie...

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Or perhaps:

C) Bonnie likes (or at least doesn't mind) having citrus sprayed in her face and so continues to bark.

This explanation has the added bonus of making no comment on Bonnie's intelligence, but just implies an unusual proclivity for citrus.

:o)

Unknown said...

BTW... I would think the cure would be worse than the disease here. Wouldn't your dog's head get all sticky from the citrus and require almost constant bathing?

Sangediver said...

Proclivity? Nice obscure word usage there!

And it's not really a citrus solution, it's an oil from a few types of grasses. It's mainly used as an insect repellant - basically a smelly substance. But that's a good questions and so far I haven't heard anyone complain about sticky dog heads.

Bottom line is I think I'm going to stick with either my training collar I already own or an tone collar.

Unknown said...

Um... that word doesn't have anything to do with the female anatomy, so you don't have to be so excited about it.

(I know that you know what it means, I'm just kidding you :o)

Sangediver said...

But there's a woman's name that rhymes with it...I just assumed...