Fitting a dog collar correctly should be neither a too big nor too tight kind of question but, first, one of purpose and placement. In other words, are you fitting a collar on a dog to train and guide your animal or just to decorate and hang an ID tag from it? Second, are you fitting a dog collar because you prefer it over a harness?
The correct way to fit a dog collar is to strap it right behind your dog’s ears with enough clearance between your dog’s spine and the collar to fit two to three of your fingers stacked together within that gap. This should keep the collar in the upper portion of your dog’s neck fitting comfortably on your pet rather than sitting lower down the neck onto the dog’s shoulders, where maneuvering the dog with your leash becomes far more challenging.
Why Is This Dog Collar Placement Critical?
By placing the collar around your dog’s upper neck area and behind the ears, you’re able better to control the dog’s center of mass with that collar, which is the animal’s head, rather than down the neck and to the shoulders that are harder to turn with a simple, gentle jerk of the leash on the collar.
Harnesses, by comparison, move the center of mass to your dog’s chest, some in fact to the dog’s back, which require far more strength to yank the dog in any direction you want than with a collar. In fact, harnesses often fail to direct the dog where you want it to go. This is critical during an emergency, such as to avoid a dog fight or an accident. When harnessed, the dog is simply set to pull rather than to be oriented.
And if your dog is big and strong, then your required force to guide the animal will be the more substantial. Can you handle it? Can you maneuver your pet? So, guiding the head instead by fitting a dog collar behind the ears, while not so tightly to make the dog uncomfortable when panting or barking, gives you control for less exertion no matter how big a dog you have.
But how tight should a collar fit a dog, you might ask now, not just where should a dog collar sit on the dog’s neck?
Fitting A Dog Collar Tight or Loose
This now is a matter over whether it’s preferable to use a dog collar too big to avoid dog throat injury and no longer a matter of how to put on a collar at the right place of the body. It is a problem to have too big and loose of a dog collar as fitting. To fix a dog collar that is too big, rely less on plastic clip dog collars.
Use metal flat buckle collars instead, whose tightness you can manually set in place. The rule remains to slide your index and middle fingers between the collar and the dog’s neck to determine a snugly but not tight fit, the point being to keep the dog’s head from slipping while also not strangulating the dog’s trachea if the dog twists or strains to get out from your pull.
Keep in mind that if you will be training your dog using a shock vs. e-collar, the space between these type of collars and the dog’s skin is entirely different than between a dog’s neck and a regular dog walker collar.
Also, while not quite the same as a dog head collar, that literally straps around a dog’s nose to gain even more leverage over the dog’s head, a regular neck collar should be worn similarly high on the neck. And it’s aim is never to choke the dog.
Choke collars, as controversial as they are, much like prong collars, are designs for entirely different purposes, managing to apply specific pressure delivered via controlled strangulation or pinching that helps dog trainers who believe in negative reinforcement to control and teach extremely hard to manage dogs to become compliant.
Measuring The Dog Collar Fit
An important detail to fitting a dog collar correctly is to measure the length of the collar to wrap around the dog’s neck. Do so by wrapping a string around your dog’s neck and behind it’s ears where the traditional collar eventually will be worn. Leave the 2 to 3-finger gap between the neck and your string required for clearance, and then cut the string to match against a tape measure.
Be sure to consider that the string does not include the length of the clips or buckle of the collar that you’ll be buying, but only the collar’s internal length between the clips. This way you don’t end up purchasing a dog collar that is too short.
Choose a collar size that approximates your dog’s neck size. The following table by Wolfgang USA Webbing Collars should help estimate how to translate your inch measurements to Small-Medium-Large dog sizes for collars.
Finally, let us not forget the second reason why you’d wish to fit a dog collar correctly. And this is because you’d like to display your dog’s personality. Dash and pizzazz!
Whether you wish your dog to wear a toned downed yet stylish night owl type of color or some bright even scandalous daydreaming colors, you want that collar to be visible at night, weather proof and long-lasting, not merely comfortable.
And Why Not a Leash to Match?
Wolgang USA has several dog collar/leash collections we recommend if you’re looking for stylish traditional collars once you decide to exhibit your dog’s personality. Here’s a link to their clearance sale offering up to 60% off selected items to make you and your dog look spectacular!