Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After adopting a rescued dog and agonizing over her non-stop barking / cries for attention while we were away at work, we resorted to trying this collar. We had tried behavior modification techniques such as progressively increasing our separation time, mixing up our departure preparations (keys, shoes, etc), ignoring her for 30-45 minutes prior to departure and ignoring the excited dog upon return home. I was reticent to try a static correction collar because our dog is skittish to begin with, but after evaluating our dog via our petcams for a week, I determined that this collar was worth a shot. I had to do something to keep our dog calm and quiet so we wouldn't end up being THAT neighbor with THAT dog. Some caveats: Vets and dog behavior experts warn against bark collars for dogs exhibiting fearful or separation-anxiety based behaviors so I was very deliberate in my decision to use this collar. I decided that this collar might be worth a shot because: 1) Our dog does not get worked up when we prepare to leave, a classic sign of separation anxiety. 2) We do not mind if our dog does bark when we're home. We remove the collar when we're home. 3) Our dog's barking would escalate over time: That is, unanswered barking would lead to more frantic barking, which would lead to even more frantic barking. 4) We exercise our dog every day in the form of twice-daily 3 mile runs, one in the AM and another in the PM. This dog is getting plenty of exercise. I tried the collar on myself before putting it on my dog. I looked ridiculous with the damn thing around my neck but I couldn't in good conscience put this on my dog without experiencing it for myself. That being said, the strongest zap I felt after pushing the collar was equivalent to a strong static electricity discharge. For me it felt like touching my car on a hot, dry and windy day (think Santa Ana winds for you SoCal folks). Unpleasant but definitely not painful. We introduced the collar by putting it on our dog while turned off. This allowed her to get used to the presence of the collar without any chance of unintended correction. After several rounds of acclimatization, we set the collar to Mode 1 (temperament learning), put the collar on and tested her by "leaving the house" for increasingly longer periods of time, all while monitoring our petcams from my laptop in our garage. It took her about 30 minutes of napping after her morning run to realize that we had left the house. At that time she initiated her first test bark. This first bark didn't cause a detectable correction. As was typical of her barking routine, she escalated her barking pattern after not receiving any type of response to her initial bark. The second round of barking triggered a correction "zap". The barking we had become accustomed to hearing was suddenly interrupted and our dog stopped dead in her tracks. She abruptly looked around to see where the correction came from. Finding nothing, she returned indoors and started her routine over again, as if we had just left. For this bark she received another correction "zap." This is the remarkable part: She instantly calmed down and went outside to lay in her favorite spot in our lawn. When she put her head down and put out a big **SIGH**, we "returned home" from the garage. She flew into the house, happy to see us as always and and exhibited no signs of trauma from the collar. We left the collar on and only rewarded her once she had calmed down. At that point, we removed the collar and went out to play. We repeated this process several times over the weekend and by midday on the second day, she had completely abandoned her barking / searching routine. She instead chooses to lay in her spot on the lawn or in her bed with only occasional poking around to see if we're around. We've been going on 3 weeks with this routine and I couldn't be more pleased. Our dog is calm when we're away and I am now even able to turn the collar off. Our dog knows that the collar means "no barking," and she doesn't even test it anymore. Implement the collar with other behavior techniques and I believe you'll be pleased with the result. Just buying the collar and slapping it on the dog without preparation and research may very well yield undesirable results.