@Unluckycat1
Accusing people of posting ‘ridiculous’ things is not perhaps the best way to conduct a civil discussion. But to respond to your points, though not in the same order as you made them:
PAIN
Under the guidance of a trainer, and having read a lot, listened to a lot, watched a fair bit, I habituated my dogs to wearing the collars for two or three weeks without using them, because I didn’t want them to connect the collar to the sensation - I want to be able to fade the collars and not use them again. Then, with the trainer, I found the ‘working level’: the lowest level to which the dog will react to the collar.
By ‘react’ I don’t mean ‘jump six feet into the air in terror’. I mean react in any way - twitch an ear as if a fly has landed, glance curiously downwards as if wondering where this odd feeling has come from. This is why I can confidently say that at low levels the collars do not hurt my dogs. I know how they react when they are in pain. I know how the low levels feel to me, and they seem to feel very similar to the dogs. That’s why I strongly suspect that the stronger shocks feel much the same to them as they do to me. I am very reluctant to use stronger shocks on them, as the sensation is without a doubt unpleasant and at the highest levels painful. But less painful than being hit by a car or shot by a farmer or laid open by a muntjac. And as I have already said, I use positive reinforcement loads, and I had got a long way with my older dog using it to counter chasing. But… hares.
I then taught the dogs how to escape the sensation. I introduced it at the working level, called the dog, and the second she responded, turned it off. I did this enough times that both dogs understood that this peculiar tingly feeling stopped the split second that they responded to me.
That was before I ever used the collars out in the wild.
FEAR
There’s one poster on here saying their high prey drive dog (dogs?) can see all the prey that used to send them into chase mode, and they ignore them now. Surely that just means they associate the prey with pain? Pain bad enough that it overrides their strong natural instincts.
That was me. All I can say to that is that my dogs still hunt just as keenly as they used to. The two of them were stalking rabbits the other day, but they didn’t chase. They didn't chase rabbits this morning either, when DH took them out without the collars on. When they saw the muntjac that I mentioned along the track, they were alert and interested, not suppressed and afraid. If they had looked frightened I would have questioned the use of the collars. But they didn’t.
One of them is slightly avoidant of sheep. Not so avoidant that she won’t walk past within a couple of feet, more a suspicious side-eye. She is terrified of swans, which has nothing to do with the e-collar but goes back to a swan that chased her around a pond, catching up with her and menacing her. She is not terrified of sheep. I can 100% tell the difference. She won’t walk past swans, even on-lead and on the other side of me at 6 or 8 feet away. She will walk past sheep off-lead, within a few feet, without me in between.
how exactly do shock collar advocates think they work?
They work like any other aversive: the dog associates an unpleasant event with a certain thing or behaviour. I daresay that you’ve burned yourself on a frying pan or similar at some point in your life. You don’t live in mortal fear of the frying pan and have a flight-or-fight response every time you see one. You just know what to do to avoid the unpleasant sensation. A well-conditioned e-collar response is the same. My dogs know that chasing is the thing that brings the sensation.
They also know that a low-level stim is like a quiet ‘no’. It’s a reminder. It cuts through their fixation in a way that a voice does not. They respond, and they are rewarded.
But I feel confident that introducing fear (or 'threat of pain' if you'd prefer) into every walk and then claiming you've increased your dog's happiness is disingenuous to the extreme.
I can see why you would think that. But if you were to see my dogs (and all the others that I know) you’d see that the dogs understand where the limits are, and that so long as they don’t break those limits, everything is fine. It’s a bit like driving: so long as you drive sensibly, you are at low risk of having an accident (you are not the only risk factor, so you can’t remove risk entirely). You don’t drive along shit scared every second. Sometimes you do something stupid and scare yourself. You know what to do to avoid that happening, so you stop being scared quite fast. It's contingent: you did something, it was bad, you were scared, you won't do it again. Blasting the dog with a random high-level shock is non-contingent, like someone roaring out of a side turning and t-boning you. That is likely to cause ongoing concern or fear, and that is why randomly blasting a dog with an e-collar is a very, very bad idea and downright abusive IMHO.
My dogs are not ‘afraid on their daily walks’ (pm me and come along on one if you like). In fact, I used to think e-collars were terrible things, just as you do, and I began to change my mind when I saw a friend putting one on his dog. To her, the collar meant nothing but good things: she was wildly excited, couldn’t wait to get out of the truck: the collar meant a chance to hunt (but not chase). Did she associate the collar with a stim? I don’t know, perhaps not, but she DID associate it with prey animals, and the freedom to run, within limits.
Could I have avoided using an e-collar if I'd been a better trainer? I'd say probably yes with my older dog, and perhaps no with the younger one. I know people who have trained several dogs to an extremely high standard and never needed an e-collar (a repeat field trial winner, one of them) suddenly find that they have a dog for whom none of their tried and tested methods works and end up using an e-collar to keep the dog safe.
Have I fucked my dogs up? 100% no: the younger one has really come into herself this past year. Are my dogs afraid on walks? Again, no. My dogs have far more freedom than they otherwise would, and they’re not scared.
I don't expect to convince you.