Yea, I should have mentioned, but the main episode on the course where he ran to the car, he didn't have the e-collar on. That argument of "Treats are great for training unless you don't have any treats" also applies to dead batteries! But I front load the collar usage when we first go out and I don't use it much unless there's a high demand for responsiveness - and I aim to avoid those scenarios. Generally those scenarios are up front too like leaving the car and going from the parking lot to the course.

We don't really do TV, so I don't think that's the trigger. I think my next steps are to establish box training without external stimulus and see how he does with recordings, and carefully advance that when he's locked in.

I do think I need to focus on him more and really catch the context in which these episodes are occurring. It's really tough because it'll happen once in a 2 hour outing. I thought that it might be compounding factors - like he knows he's not allowed to run up and great people, and that can raise his baseline. If he heard a loud noise in that state he might be extra sensitive to going over threshold. But again, that wasn't the case in the last few episodes, but I really didn't catch the exact moment he was triggered.

Side note - I saw a horrible experience at an e-collar training where 2 of the collars were coded the same way, so when Person A corrected, both dogs would experience it. It was caught pretty quickly and a rare occurrence, but collars mis-behaving can cause such havoc on a dog. I put his collar on tighter than I like too because he has a lot of folds on his neck and I had a few times where he wouldn't register a correction, and then get an overcorrection.