We love our pets but we live in a community and no one else is obliged to put up with the nuisance that my dog can generate. It’s easy, I don’t like to bother my neighbours, I don’t like to bother anyone, the same way I don’t like to be bothered myself or my family. 

That said, and keeping in mind that we have a hunting dog, who alerts of its situation and where it is chasing its prey with a thunderous bark, almost a howl, we thought we should train Mike not to bark inside the apartment.

One of the adults in this family is a psychologist, has worked with laboratory animals and knows about classical conditioning to elicit a positive response and positive reinforcement of the conditioned reflex to train an animal. 

This involves reinforcing Mike when it performs an action that we like, with a positive stimulus such as food, petting, play, a sound, and associating unwanted behaviours with a voice, a sound or a vibration pattern. In such a way that the animal associates that sound with the action we do not want it to do.

Well, that’s how we started another of Mike’s education challenges. We had the idea and the theory clear, now we had to translate it into an electronic design, miniaturise it, provide it with a power source and put them together in an airtight, ergonomic box that could be easily mounted on the collar of our dear Mike. 

We have to say that we are not engineers, but we do have a great technological curiosity and by reading a lot, talking to friends, asking for advice, we managed to develop exactly what we had in mind.

The prototype was assembled in a box made with our 3D printer, we have good contacts with laboratories that have the capacity to carry out an order of this level.

The training was very fast, we installed the device in automatic mode. The acoustic sensor detects the vibration caused by the barking of the dog in the neck and responds with a very sharp beep and a vibration of one second, the animal is automatically surprised and its reaction is silence, the vibration and the sound do not cause him any harm but they are not to his liking and he chases them in the neck. Within a few days of training, it clearly associates the action that provokes the stimulation and stops barking inside the house.