Fear of a Dog Collar: One Easy Tip for Helping a Fearful Pup

In this Omaha dog training session, we work with a friendly 1-year-old Shiba Inu named Kenji. We help him overcome his fear of a dog collar.

Before I shared some tips to stop a dog from fearing the collar, we talked at length about establishing a healthy leader-follower dynamic, shared tips on exercise and how to add a little structure to help a dog feel more confident in his human.

Tips to Help with A Fear of a Dog Collar

At the end of the session, I showed the guardian how to use a Conditioned Emotional Response, or CER. This method can help a dog overcome their fear of wearing a collar.

Looking back, I wish we had filmed the video on how to stop a dog from being scared of a collar earlier. A few of the exercises we went over before (establishing an invisible boundary) had a lingering effect.

Combined with how intense Kenji’s fear of the dog collar was turned out to be a bad combination.

Kenji used avoidance or moved away. These actions make it hard to help a dog overcome a fear using a CER.

Stop Fear of Wearing a Dog Collar with a CER

Helping a dog overcome a fear with a CER is one of my favorite dog training methods. Its minimial, easy to do and operant; meaning the dog does it on their own. This allows us to wortk at the dog’s pace. A crucial, yet often overlooked aspect of dog behavior modificaiton. Its paramount to go at the dog’s pace if you want to fix behavior problems such as when you want to stop a dog from fearing the collar.

Since the CER is so passive, it often leads to faster progress, as shown in this video from another session.

If the guardian uses this CER tip, he can help his pooch get over his fear of a dog collar. When Kenji is calm and relaxed, he should use the collar I gave him to use instead.

This new collar did not cause a strong reaction. The exact thing you want to accomplish if you want to help with a fear of a dog collar. The CER exercise can help his dog feel less scared of the collar. In fact, it can change it from fear of a dog collar to loving the dog collar. And the great thing about this method for helping a dog with collar fear is that you don’t need to be a pro.

Because he lives so close, I asked him to call or text me if he is having issues with the technique. If so, I might stop by for a quick tutorial. This can help eliminate or reduce stress, fear and anxiety that resulted from my initial in home home dog training appointment.

Fortunately it should not be too difficult to help Kenji get over his fear of a dog collar. It wont be an overnight fix, but wont take too much work. His human needs to remember that Kenji is not choosing to have a fear of wearing a collar, this is simply an emotional response. Likely due to a negative experience with a dog collar when he was a puppy.

We actually go over a collar game in our positive puppy classes to help yopung puppies avoid this exact situation.

Now starting off on the right paw as a puppy is always best. But you can still use this tip to stop a dog from fearing the collar with adult dogs too.

To help Kenji’s guardian remember what we talked about, I made a roadmap to success video. Check out the free summary video below.