The puppy collar serves many purposes and can be one of the first things your puppy learns. It enables you to control your energetic puppy, secondly it teaches her to accept you as her leader and finally it allows her to get used to wearing something around her neck – which is essential when you take her out for walks in the morning and evenings.

Choosing a collar is relatively simple; just ensure that when it is fitted that you can slip two fingers sideways between her neck and the collar.

Not all puppies like to wear a collar. The first time you put it on they may whine, bark or scratch it off with their back legs. If your puppy is becoming very agitated about the collar, instead of taking it off, try to distract her with a toy or a treat so that she temporarily forgets about wearing the collar. You don’t want to let your puppy wear the collar all the time in the beginning, start off with short time durations and slowly increase the time that she keeps it on. When putting her to sleep you can remove the collar, particularly if you are using a crate, incase she catches it on something. Eventually you can make her associate the collar with walk times and going out of the house so if she’s not wearing the collar she should stay outside. Other people use the collar to associate it with being awake and going to sleep, so removing the collar is like getting ready for bed and she should go to sleep.

Once your puppy is fully accepting of the collar it enables you to start obedience training to ensure that she understands that you are the leader and that she must always listen to you. If you find that it is still a struggle to put the collar on you can always teach her to fetch the collar herself and reward her with praise. Fetching is an obedience trait and lets her know that she should be listening to you. The next step is to get her used to being on a leash, again, this can be started slowly and within the house. As you do your household chores you can lead her around.

One important point that many people don’t understand about the collar and leash is that it is a very effective training devise if used correctly. For example, never pull on the leash in order to cause discomfort to force your puppy to follow you. Puppies are very inquisitive, easily distracted and want to go off and investigate – not a good trait if you want to take them outside where you need full control over what they do. Instead of pulling, use gentle pressure by holding the leash tight. If your puppy stops unexpectedly then you should also stop but keep a certain amount of pressure on the collar so that the puppy will learn that to release the pressure, she needs to come to heel or carry on walking. For this training exercise it is advisable to have a short 6 foot leash rather than a long retractable leash.

Keeping the leash short enables her to listen and focus on your commands without getting too distracted. Once she responds to commands like “Come!” and “Heel!” then you can start using a longer leash.