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There is nothing wrong with using a shock collar. View the dog as a working animal, its job is essentially to perform as an actor contributing to his streams. In exchange it receives food, shelter and so forth. It seems like a fair deal for the dog, I see nothing wrong with this.
Pet owners online are some of the most deranged, toxic people I have ever encountered. They seem to view dogs and cats as our masters, that we must deliver them lavish accommodations and expect nothing in return. Suffice it to say I find this unreasonable. If a human is expected to have a job, so too can a dog.
Shock collars can be a useful training tool in extreme cases when normal tools are ineffective. But they have to be used in close temporal proximity to the bad behavior and coupled with other methods of training and positive reinforcement. The goal is always to move away from a shock collar as soon as possible.
What happened in the video was pretty much the opposite of effective use of a shock collar. He administers the shock for a fairly minor and random bit of animal behavior that isn’t putting the dog or person at risk, he administers the shock too late, it is not accompanied by clear warning or commands. From the dog’s perspective, this is just pain being inflicted at random. It is not meaningful cruelty, but meaningless. Piker gets angry and hurts the dog.
So at worst he is guilty of using a less-than-optimal training technique. I view it as identical to spanking children. Perhaps there is a more optimal way of training a child, but people are under no moral obligation to be maximally optimal in everything they do. Obviously physically disciplining a child could be taken to the point of abuse, but a spanking is not in-and-of-itself abusive and does not require being the most optimal method
No, he's guilty of pointless cruelty directed at an animal that did nothing wrong. It's flatly evil.
The discipline of children is an excellent comparison. There's nothing wrong with the training tool in and of itself, but inflicted on a child for no real reason with no reasonable end goal, it's simply abuse. A man shocking a dog or hitting a child for not instantly complying with his pointless whims is a sinister individual.
The animal did something wrong though, it strayed from the desired position necessary for the stream. I don’t see why “actor” is a less valid vocation for a dog than any of the other myriad tasks we have forced them to do through the years. Being forced to stay in a given location for a stream seems quite similar to dogs assigned to guard a certain area, which are often chained for the purpose, and this seems like a much more luxurious assignment than a junkyard.
It is legitimately impossible for me to believe that this is a sincerely held belief. The dog has no capacity to understand the role of an "actor", this is merely being subject to pointless misery for its entire life. It really seems like you're just trying too hard to lean into how lame it is that people care about dogs.
You think the dogs running on treadmills to turn spits in Victorian England “understood” how their motive power was being transferred through cogs and widgets to procure a homogeneous meat temperature so the Earl of Chelmsford could entertain his dinner guests with delicious roast? Come on, requiring that a dog understand its role in order for its work to be morally permissable is ludicrous.
I dont know this specific story, but dogs, as part of their nature, love running. If their running was naturally transformed into human worth they dont give a crap.
Dogs dont naturally love being shocked.
Or sitting in a single location with 0 latitude to move a foot in either direction
Dogs are famously not creatures that love to sit still
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