Present Circumstances Call For head-on assessment of the arguments used to promote electric training collars for dogs. In Trails-talk in the last issue I highlighted the Kennel Club's support for moves effectively to outlaw them.

However, if you go to www.spanieljournal.com you'll find an article of unashamed advocacy by Martin Deeley, no less, titled  The Modern Remote Electric Training Collar. Its appearance should be no surprise - since Martin became domiciled in the USA he has made various generally positive comments about the technology and the key words 'modern' and 'remote' in his title indicate his purposes in the article.

The promise of control, as something distinct from distance, is crucial to the message. And, indeed, if you look at something like Bill Hillman's Training Retrievers: Methods and Concepts of Twenty Top Profesionals  published as recently as 1979 you will be treated to a graphic insight into the culture which spawned this technology.

Some amongst them variously make reference to slingshots and loading cartridges to fire at dogs by way of pointing to the advantages of the collar and many use words like 'zap' and 'burn' to characterise its use. There are, of course, many words of wisdom: not least from Dick Sampson who offers the observation that: "The electric collar is an extremely danger­ous training aid to a person that doesn't have a thorough understanding of how it is to be used. It's so quick and severe that many times the dog doesn't understand what the impulse is for and you just take all the drive out of the dog."

The point of referring to this book is to emphasise that the electric collar has a long, and often dubious, history and it comes from a culture where it is second nature to use it. Such devices are, fix instance, routinely used for control purposes in penal establishments in America, especially high security ones.

No wonder the spanieljournal.com article has 'modern' in its title. Martin is keen to draw a line under the pre-history of the single intensity electric collar so that he can present his endorsement uncluttered by skeletons in the cupboard. And. make no mistake, it is a ringing endorsement. Indeed, a sen­tence which is taken out and highlighted, reads:'Now you can take away every piece of equipment I own - as long as you leave me ,With my remote Trainer - and a few dummies.'

In engaging in discussions about electric collars over many years I was vulnerable to the charge that I had not experi­enced or used one That did not invalidate the point I was typ­ically making, that the technology would be likely to be mis-­used by people who didn't know what they were doing. Not a knock-out blow, but a significant criticism nonetheless. Well. I'm no longer vulnerable. I have put my finger and thumb on the terminals of one of these devices and also strapped it onto my calf and subjected myself to varying levels of shock.

The model I tested was a PAC 250. On the collar was a button with five settings, whilst the handset had a button, like a volume control, which went by continuous gradation from minimum to maximum. With fingers on the terminals on a minimum setting at Level 1 the effect was, indeed, barely dis­cernible. 'Tickle' is not an unfair description, though I would prefer 'pin prick'. The sense of electric shock is not apparent until Level 3, is accentuated at Level 4 and, at Level 5, I found myself pulling my finger and thumb away in a reflex manner. So far so good, and I wouldn't even describe the sensations with the word 'pain', more a serious apprehension about elec­tricity which Martin acknowledges many of us are - sensibly I would say - saddled with.

A dog’s neck, close to spinal cord and brain, is nothing like a human leg of course. But, nevertheless I strapped it to my calf and, not wishing to subject myself to too much of this sort of

thing, went straight for a maximum at Level 5. My leg, whol­ly involuntarily, jerked a foot or so in the air and I had that characteristic tremor sensation for sometime afterwards. My conclusion? This device has the capability to deliver a serious shock. Will people use it? I want to think well of my fellow humans, honestly I do, especially at this festive time, but expe­rience suggests that those who are angry and frustrated are capable of almost anything. It is overwhelmingly a technology for a negative philosophy and the prospect of easy correction combined with effortless escalation makes it dangerous.

The implications for longer term welfare and bid ability of our gundog breeds are not likely to be positive, despite its obvious attractions for some. Thomas Hobbes, the 17th cen­tury political philosopher, famously characterised the life of man as" . . . nasty, brutish and short." Dogs, sadly, have lives which are far too short: but we should be doing all we can to avoid them being nasty and brutish as well,