![]() ![]() Silicone tags, such as the ones from, are a safe alternative. However, even these are taken off when I am not home or when I am fostering a dog who might play with my younger dog (my older dog doesn’t play). They are microchipped and the chips are registered to me with current contact information.īut if keeping ID on your dog is more critical to you, perhaps because your dog might be a major flight risk if she got loose, there are a few safer solutions.Īs an alternative to using ID tags, I buy collars that have side-release plastic buckles (easy to unsnap in an emergency) and have my phone number stitched into the fabric. If they escaped my home, say, in an earthquake or something, I know that they would readily go to my neighbors or even strangers for rescue. Personally, I am comfortable having my dogs collar-free most of the time. Best case, someone is home and rescues them. Their tags slip through the vent as they lay on the floor, and when they try to get up, the tags turn and get stuck. More commonly, dogs get stuck when they lay on a floor near a floor-mounted vent, either warming or cooling themselves, as appropriate for the season. I heard a ruckus and found her thrashing her tags had somehow slipped through the ventilating slits on the side of the crate (perhaps when she was turning around?) and got stuck. The last time I used tags was on a foster dog I had crated in my kitchen. ![]() Here’s the other thing I don’t like to see hanging from dogs’ necks: Metal or other rigid ID tags – because it’s easy for tags to get caught on things, pinning a dog in a scary position and causing her to panic. Real life! Tricia shared the photo to warn others of this potential danger. An assistance dog that Tricia is raising got her tag stuck in a bathroom floor vent as Tricia was, um, in the bathroom. TAG, YOU’RE IT As I was completing this article, I saw an Instagram post by Tricia Case of Trailblazing Tails. Playful dogs who are left home alone together shouldn’t be wearing collars, either. There is a second lesson to be learned from my nightmare story: When dog friends are playing bitey-face games, they shouldn’t be wearing collars at all. About two seconds after the collar was cut, he took a gasping, ragged breath, and then another, and slowly came to as we sobbed and patted him and the other dog and hugged each other. She managed to hack through the thick nylon collar, releasing the dogs just a moment after the choking one lost consciousness and released his bowels. I finally found the buckle for that collar, and it was partially in the mouth of the dog who was twisted, impossibly tight – too tight to be able to tighten it more in order to get the tang of the buckle undone.Īs I was working to find the buckles, one of the other women ran into the house and got scissors. One dog was wearing a quick-release collar – but it wasn’t the collar that was tight. I dug my hands into the dogs’ fur, looking for buckles to unbuckle. I and the dogs’ owners, both young women, tried frantically to figure out how to untwist the dogs, but they were big, strong dogs in a full panic, and we couldn’t do it. Two dogs had been playing when one grabbed the other by his collar and then rolled over the collar twisted, pressing his tongue into his own lower teeth – and tightening to the point of choking his playmate. But I ran to help when I heard the sound of dogs and women screaming, and was confronted with a writhing tangle of gasping, screaming, urinating, panicking canines. The dog who nearly choked to death in my hands was not my dog – he belonged to a neighbor. And you will have to believe me when I say I know, from personal experience, that when a dog starts choking to death, he won’t be holding cooperatively still in perfect understanding that you need to make his discomfort worse for a moment in order to save his life. The answer is: Because in a terrible emergency, when a dog’s collar is caught on something and he’s choking to death, the only way to unbuckle that buckle – to get that metal prong or tang out of its hole – is to pull it a little bit tighter. Why have I taken a stand against such a ubiquitous piece of dog equipment? The first danger I won’t expose my dogs to is a collar with a regular metal buckle – you know! The kind that has a frame and a tang or prong that fits through a hole on the collar and is secured by the back of the buckle frame.
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