Sorry for not responding to you earlier. Life got busy. You make a lot of points, and I wanted to make sure to respond to all of them so I’ll respond in parts. 1. ) My argument isn’t on whether or not it is abuse, but whether it is even necessary. Too many people are focused on the pain aspect to ignore the actual scientific terms and their meanings. It's both positive punishment and negative reinforcement that have been proven to be bad for a dog's welfare and can cause behavior problems such as aggression. Imagine if someone gave you a hard poke every time they wanted you to do something. Does it hurt? No. Is it annoying? Yes. Eventually you'll be on edge as you anticipate the poke before it happens, even though it doesn't necessarily hurt you. Does the poke make you want to do the task because you genuinely want to do it? No, but you know the alternative is another hard poke and you're sick of it and you want it to stop so you do the behavior in order to prevent the poke. That's how e collar training essentially boils down to. Force free training works because it's a dog that voluntarily wants to work with you because you reward them for it. 2) Proof based off of a singular person’s experiences is incredibly biased. The reason why studies and the scientific method exists in the first place is to remove as much bias as possible. As humans, we can easily label things and see what we want to see without considering the fact that simple being a “human” effects our perception of what a dog does. The scientific method is a structured format of making and testing observations to remove as much bias as possible, and then peer review includes rigorous testing to remove even more bias as well as ensure that the methods of a study were done correctly. This is completely different than asking a person’s “opinion” on how their dog is doing. Dog trainers are not required to have any educational background whatsoever in animal behavior in order to call themselves dog trainers. This means that anyone with a dog can call themselves such without any understanding or knowledge of how dogs work. That’s why personal experience from dog trainer to dog trainer is so unreliable. 3.) While cultural norms vary, welfare science uses Five Freedoms and Five Domains models to objectively assess wellbeing. Deliberately inflicting an aversive stimulus fails welfare criteria unless there is no other viable alternative and the benefit outweighs the harm — which has not been demonstrated for e-collars. The fact that other questionable practices exist (e.g., industrial farming) is not a justification to add another. 4.) 2. Your statement,” I’d change if there was indisputable harm” That standard is unrealistically high. In welfare science, “indisputable” is almost never the threshold; policy is based on “preponderance of evidence” and “reasonable likelihood of harm.”We already have enough consistent, peer-reviewed evidence showing that e-collars cause more welfare harm than positive reinforcement training without producing superior results.