In September 2022, New York State Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal introduced a bill that would ban the sale of electric shock collars for dogs in the state. The mechanics were simple: sell one, face a fine of up to $500. The ambition was bigger. If it became law, New York would become the first U.S. state to outlaw selling the devices outright.
Rosenthal’s own memorandum framed the collars as a welfare issue, noting that they can cause skin burns and provoke stress and anxiety that can spill over into aggression or other problem behaviors. She also pointed out that New York would be joining a list of countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany among them, that had already restricted or banned shock collars. Coming not long after New York moved to dismantle its puppy-mill supply chain, the proposal looked like part of a broader shift in how the state treats animals under the law.
Whether or not a sales ban is the right tool, the behavioral question underneath it is worth understanding, because the science on how these collars work had been pointing one direction for years.
What a shock collar actually does to training
Modern, credentialed dog trainers overwhelmingly favor positive reinforcement, rewarding the behavior you want so the dog does more of it. A shock collar sits on the opposite end: it belongs to positive-punishment training, which adds something unpleasant, a jolt, to discourage a behavior. The difference is not just philosophical. Decades of study and practice have made reward-based training the method most professionals consider both the most humane and the most effective.
The trouble with punishment tools is that they tend to create new problems while suppressing old ones. Shock collars, prong collars, and shock-based electric fences often mask an unwanted behavior without teaching the dog what to do instead, and along the way they can manufacture fear, aggression, and a shut-down state known as learned helplessness.
“The thing a shock collar teaches most reliably isn’t the lesson the owner intended, it’s that scary things happen without warning,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “A dog zapped for barking at a passing dog doesn’t conclude ‘I should be quiet.’ It concludes that other dogs, or the leash, or the street, predict pain. Now you’ve got a fearful or reactive dog on top of the original problem, and that’s a much harder thing to undo.”
Play that out and the failure modes are easy to picture. Shock a dog for barking on a walk and you may not get a quiet dog; you may get one who is terrified of the leash and refuses to go outside. Pain is also a logical trigger for aggression, so instead of a teacher, the dog starts to see its handler as a threat. And the third outcome, learned helplessness, is the bleakest: enough punishment, and a dog stops believing its own actions change anything, so it simply gives up and goes numb.
Why the experts line up the same way
None of this is a fringe position. The fear-free and force-free training world has been unified on it for a long time. Organizations built on the science of low-stress handling point to shock collars as a warning sign when you’re screening a trainer, and leaders in that field have long argued that fear is one of the most damaging things a social animal can experience, capable of doing lasting harm. The counter-message from reward-based trainers is consistent: show a dog what you want, mark the moment they get close, and pay them for it. It takes patience, but it builds a dog who trusts you instead of one who flinches.
One fair caveat that often gets lost in the debate: some pet parents use the vibrate-only setting on these collars to communicate with deaf dogs, a genuinely helpful accessibility use that is a different thing from shocking a dog as punishment.
What’s new since this was written
The 2022 bill did not become law. Efforts to ban the sale of shock collars have continued to be introduced in the New York legislature in later sessions, but as of 2026 no U.S. state has enacted an outright ban on selling them, and the devices remain widely available for purchase. The behavioral consensus, meanwhile, has only hardened: major veterinary and training bodies have continued to publish position statements discouraging shock-based, or “aversive,” tools in favor of reward-based methods. So while the legal picture stalled, the professional advice for individual pet parents did not change, and it is the same advice that motivated the bill in the first place.
