You will always find a member on most any forum who will habitually fall back on the only answer available to him...that is....to consistently and invariably poo poo any study, well done or not in order to make it appear that his own opinion has equal or better validity. Don't let yourself be swayed by such transparent attempts to reduce the good information coming from reliable sources.
Since I'm sure this is directed at me I'll address it. The first link, is not good information coming from a reliable source. It's biased and reaching.
It's findings have nothing to do with ecollars or no ecollars. it is the variable they chose to look at and cite as the reason for what their biased eyes observed.
You see, as a scientist, or someone that really reads and understands it, picks up on these things in studies.
First off a good reliable study, the people offering the subjective (right off the bat this isn't considered "good" data for an experiement, but I digress) opinions for data would be blinded. they wouldn't be able to observe which group was trained with shock and which ones weren't. This would be done to limit the bias.
This wasn't done, the bias of the Experimenters was free to influence their observations and their findings. Reason number one, and a pretty big reason this study is not a good one.
Another reason, it has a pretty small sample size
another reason, the differences in frequency that they subjectively thru biased eyes, concluded showed more stress behaviors in ecollar trained dogs vs controls are not statistically significant in most cases. If this was a study to get an approval for a new medication it would be tossed, and that's saying something when a drug like claritin that performed really no better than a water pill can get approval you know the bar isn't set very high. But that's another debate.
Another reason this study isn't really valid is that it even attempt to address why there was on average one more tongue flick during the back transport for ecollared dogs vs, non. It doesn't address the dogs backgrounds. Lots of handlers I know that use an ecollar on dogs, are often times used on dogs that have gone thru multiple handlers with poor results were immune to any other type of correction and the ecollar was used.
Sometimes ecollars are used first for training by certain types of trainers.
You know, the ones that kick ass and take names, the ones that need results today, methods be damned. The ones that kick their dogs ass for not sitting fast enough. Now the ecollar has nothing to do with that. They'll end up with stressed out dogs no matter what they're using to train their dog with. They could go leash and collarless and still have stressed out dogs, but this study doesn't account or even consider that.
It doesn't because these "esteemed" researchers like their bias and though they try to veil it thru shoddy "science" anyone with an eye for science literature can see right thru it.
There' many other reasons this study is not valid, none of which have anything to do with me want to poo poo on anything, but I have to get off of here for a bit. maybe I'll get into more later.