And what on earth will they do with the electronic collars that retriever trainers use to "reach out and touch" Bullet when he's two fields away and not listening to the whistle?
It's a "controversial training tool," even more so than a prong collar -- but judiciously and carefully used, it works. I went to a seminar with a high-up retriever trial guru (and N.J. would no doubt touch this fellow up for the license) and he used my dog as a guinea pig to show how to train the "here" command. He never took the collar above high "2" (3 levels on each number, goes up to 15), but she was zooming to heel like she'd been shot out of gun in 10 minutes.
If you have a hard-headed Lab like mine that you're trying to train for retrieving work, you pretty much have to have the Ecollar. (In the days before Ecollars, trainers used pellet guns or slingshots with BBs . . . wonder what PETA would think of THAT!)
I remember, when I was a kid, my dad used the pellet gun technique on clients who had dogs with *extreme* recall problems - maybe 1 case every year or two. It did work wonders, but PETA would certainly condemn that technique today.